I finished a book called Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America at the end of February. I expected good things from it. I expected a breezy but analytical approach to Nintendo and Mario's history. I got something that sails with a heavy anchor and a damaged rudder.
First things first: the cover art is pretty cool. It's minimal, but I like the blue color and the little Mario jumping above the title. It's like he can leap over any obstacle! Unfortunately, the text is not free of such things.
At under 300 pages, Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America goes for a brief history of Nintendo through the years. Each chapter is themed around a console, peripheral, or major event. It was nice to see the whole history, from hanafuda to Wii, the latest console at the time of publishing, however, I wish that Jeff Ryan, the author, had covered a bit more topics and more thoroughly. Even adding a few pages to each chapter could have added a lot more information and still kept the book under 400 pages.
The biggest issue for me was the number of factual errors made by Ryan in the text.
The author makes some statements that are not exactly false but also not as drastic as he makes them out to be. Saying that the Game Boy Advance SP looks little like a Game Boy compared to the original Game Boy Advance is pretty weird. Describing the main difference between the original two Pokemon games as the playable character changing, is not really true either. The default names change, but the sprites and storylines do not. The main difference is obviously the different Pokemon in each game. He also describes Mega Man and Castlevania as having only one 3D game each before shifting back to 2D, but there were three Mega Man Legends games and two Castlevania games on the N64.
Finally, I just have some general issues with the format. Most chapters end on a kind of cliffhanger; that's pretty standard. The problem is that quite a few of the following chapters begin with non-sequitur statements about fan games, previously unmentioned composers or developers, or descriptions of totally different consoles. This breaks the flow a bit; it can certainly work, though it is not done particularly well here.
On that same note, Ryan also has a few places where he drops a huge list onto the reader. These lists continue for multiple pages. It's kind of funny to read about all of the goofy Mario merchandise, but devoting half of a chapter to it makes me lose all interest.
Finally, there are some minor spelling errors and a weird pixelated (and I don't mean like Mario) publisher logo on the title page. These errors make me wonder if there was an editor, and, if so, how much they were paid. Even without an editor, the author should have fact-checked his own work.
Some reviews on Amazon note Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America as lacking much detail on the people at Nintendo. I didn't find that to be the case. I don't know about comparing Reggie Fils-Aimé to Will Smith is in good taste or sensible, but something that I did enjoy about the book was the continued callbacks to previously established ideas from Gunpei Yokoi and Hiroshi Yamauchi. This helped connect Nintendo through the years, telling the story of the company through its teams, not just the story of a team or a specific creator, such as Shigeru Miyamoto.
Jeff Ryan has some success channeling the story of Nintendo into a written form, but his numerous errors and hinder the experience. I got some sense of how Nintendo exists as a brand and as a continuous sequence of ideas and ideals, but there is not a lot of depth to the author's discussion of these ideas. Since the book's publication in 2011, a curious person can most certainly now find most of this info on YouTube - the reworking of Radar Scope arcade machines into Donkey Kong machines, the creation of the Virtual Boy, the proposed deal between Sony and Nintendo, the launch of the Nintendo 64 - it's all there, and it's free. The cover of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America is nice, but readers would do better elsewhere.
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America receives a Bad.
First things first: the cover art is pretty cool. It's minimal, but I like the blue color and the little Mario jumping above the title. It's like he can leap over any obstacle! Unfortunately, the text is not free of such things.
At under 300 pages, Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America goes for a brief history of Nintendo through the years. Each chapter is themed around a console, peripheral, or major event. It was nice to see the whole history, from hanafuda to Wii, the latest console at the time of publishing, however, I wish that Jeff Ryan, the author, had covered a bit more topics and more thoroughly. Even adding a few pages to each chapter could have added a lot more information and still kept the book under 400 pages.
The biggest issue for me was the number of factual errors made by Ryan in the text.
- Switches around the creators of Space Invaders, Part II and Galaxian
- Consistently calls the Famicom the Famicon
- Proclaims that Super Mario Bros. was originally a Famicon [sic] Disk System game and that players would receive a 1-Up if they touched the flagpole
- Says that there is a princess at the end of each world in Super Mario Bros.
- Calls the final boss of Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA version) Bowser instead of Wart
- Writes that Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins takes place in Sarasaland
- Merges Squaresoft and Enix into Square Enix several years early with his remarks about Square not wanting to release Dragon Warrior VII on the N64
- Describes Super Mario 64 as having 13 worlds instead of the correct 15
- Says that the Japanese word for bad is "wariu" when it is "warui"
- Confuses Tony Hawk's signature move, The 900, by calling it The 700
- Calls Sonic's creator Yuki Naka instead of the correct name of Yuji Naka
- Repeatedly states that Sonic became exclusive to the Gamecube once Sega stopped being a console developer despite numerous games on PS2, Xbox, and GBA
- Describes Mario Kart Super Circuit and F-Zero: Maximum Velocity as ports of their original SNES games
- Says that PSN required a yearly payment back in the PS3 days when it was actually free
The author makes some statements that are not exactly false but also not as drastic as he makes them out to be. Saying that the Game Boy Advance SP looks little like a Game Boy compared to the original Game Boy Advance is pretty weird. Describing the main difference between the original two Pokemon games as the playable character changing, is not really true either. The default names change, but the sprites and storylines do not. The main difference is obviously the different Pokemon in each game. He also describes Mega Man and Castlevania as having only one 3D game each before shifting back to 2D, but there were three Mega Man Legends games and two Castlevania games on the N64.
Finally, I just have some general issues with the format. Most chapters end on a kind of cliffhanger; that's pretty standard. The problem is that quite a few of the following chapters begin with non-sequitur statements about fan games, previously unmentioned composers or developers, or descriptions of totally different consoles. This breaks the flow a bit; it can certainly work, though it is not done particularly well here.
On that same note, Ryan also has a few places where he drops a huge list onto the reader. These lists continue for multiple pages. It's kind of funny to read about all of the goofy Mario merchandise, but devoting half of a chapter to it makes me lose all interest.
Finally, there are some minor spelling errors and a weird pixelated (and I don't mean like Mario) publisher logo on the title page. These errors make me wonder if there was an editor, and, if so, how much they were paid. Even without an editor, the author should have fact-checked his own work.
Some reviews on Amazon note Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America as lacking much detail on the people at Nintendo. I didn't find that to be the case. I don't know about comparing Reggie Fils-Aimé to Will Smith is in good taste or sensible, but something that I did enjoy about the book was the continued callbacks to previously established ideas from Gunpei Yokoi and Hiroshi Yamauchi. This helped connect Nintendo through the years, telling the story of the company through its teams, not just the story of a team or a specific creator, such as Shigeru Miyamoto.
Jeff Ryan has some success channeling the story of Nintendo into a written form, but his numerous errors and hinder the experience. I got some sense of how Nintendo exists as a brand and as a continuous sequence of ideas and ideals, but there is not a lot of depth to the author's discussion of these ideas. Since the book's publication in 2011, a curious person can most certainly now find most of this info on YouTube - the reworking of Radar Scope arcade machines into Donkey Kong machines, the creation of the Virtual Boy, the proposed deal between Sony and Nintendo, the launch of the Nintendo 64 - it's all there, and it's free. The cover of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America is nice, but readers would do better elsewhere.
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America receives a Bad.
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