I Left My Twitching Fingers in S.F.

If there's anywhere in the world I would want to be this week, it would be the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Specifically, I would want to be at the Thursday keynote by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who is expected to reveal the details behind the immensely secret plans for his company in the coming years. Nintendo had been relegated to a third-place status in the recent video game console war, with Sony (aka the House that GTA Built) at the top and Microsoft (why innovate when you can buy) swaggering into second.

I own a Gamecube (Nintendo) and an Xbox (Microsoft), and I have been reading about what Microsoft is going to do, which is try to out-Sony Sony. Bigger, badder, beautiful(er). More of the same, except turn it to 11. For the most part, the strategy works now. Gamers get titles like "Halo" and "Grand Theft Auto." Online play for Sony and Microsoft wears like a natural second skin on those consoles. Nintendo seems stagnant. It got branded with "teh kiddie" (sic) image from the start, with its dinky purple lunchbox shape, lack of "mature" titles (if you completely ignore the wonderfully creepy "Eternal Darkness" and the Resident Evil series), its adherence to the Pokemon title, and the 'toony cell-shaded design of "The Wind Waker." The gaming community sneered and went back to running over hookers with stolen cars and called it art.

Which is all heartbreaking, since Nintendo gave the world the concept of video games as we know them now. Characters like Mario, Link, and Samus Aran brought people back to gaming after the disastrous crash of the gaming industry in the early 1980s, where the market was flooded with crap titles and buyers got disillusioned, pulling money fast and turning game companies into warehouses of red ink. For example, "E.T.," a game based on the hit film, was so horrific it had to be buried in the desert.

Nintendo, armed with a squat Italian plumber who liked to rescue princesses in his off hours, brought gaming back from the abyss with the NES. Programmers for Nintendo titles squeezed the hell out of the technology, making the 8-bit restraints sing with joy. And the NES begat the SNES, and there was more joy. More innovation. More fun. Nintendo was king of the hill, withstanding attacks by Sega, Coleco, and even a revived Atari. It wasn't until Sony in the 90s unveiled the Playstation that the Big N started to quaver a bit. And then the Nintendo 64 came out, and with it, some of the best games of that generation: Super Mario 64 (showing a flawless 3D world that set the gaming community on its ear), Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (regarded as one of the top games ever, even be today's standards), Goldeneye (bringing first-person shooters to the console with aplomb) and its spiritual successor Perfect Dark.

By 2001, Nintendo started selling the Gamecube, its current model in the console war. Sony came to market many months earlier with its Playstation 2, getting not only a jumpstart on the competition, but also killing the Sega Dreamcast by boxing the latter out of EA sports titles. Nintendo and Microsoft were set up to battle for second place in the fall of 2001 when they started selling their consoles (Gamecube and Xbox) to consumers. About a month before N and MS could get started, Sony dropped a bomb named Grand Theft Auto 3 and, with that, Sony was invincible.

Microsoft launched their Xbox with the space-themed shooter Halo, which was its own GTA, propelling the console into orbit. Nintendo launched, but without a Mario title or a Zelda title. The best Big N could do was have Mario's lesser brother, Fredo (I mean, Luigi), in his own title about vacuuming up ghosts. Big N tried to make up for the icon deficiency with "Super Smash Bros. Melee," a sequel to an N64 title starring Nintendo icons in a no-holds-barred brawler. But something was missing. No, a lot was missing, including a hard drive. Gamers were reduced to saving files on memory sticks, which did promote a type of detachable gaming experience (take your saved file to your friend's house, not the console). But that required your friend having a Gamecube and the matching game, and if the game was fun in multiplayer. Meanwhile, people were watching "The Matrix" on their PS2s, downloading CDs onto their Xbox and dragging the behemoth MS console to friends' houses to play Halo deathmatches. Portability was irrelevant if the people loved the game.

A couple years later Sony and MS went online, and Nintendo held back. Maybe they felt burned from their problems with NES online in Japan years ago. The Big N got smaller, got pushed around by their rivals, seemingly dropped the ball on advertising their console. Games for the Gamecube were being cancelled, and ports that were heading for the Playstation 2 and Xbox never made their way to Nintendo. Finally, big titles for the Gamecube (Super Mario Sunshine, The Wind Waker) were not wildly accepted by the critics as their predecessors due to bizarre innovations (a water-pump jet pack) or art direction (Wind Waker). Big N seemed happy to make money with its dominance in the handheld industry, but the N-console owners were screaming as they saw the Xbox and PS2 eat Nintendo's lunch. What happened to the Nintendo of the 1980s? How can an entity that gave gamers so much fun and joy in the 80s and 90s just stumble like this? It must of have hard, in the same way a child learns about Santa for the first time, a bit of childhood dies and the soul is left wandering without a compass.

And I'm one of those grown-up children, I reckon. I may not have always been there for the latest adventures of Mario or Link, but as I grow older and I count the years of gaming I have under my belt, I have a fondness for Nintendo. I want to think that Nintendo will learn from their mistakes between 2000-05, and their new console (titled "Revolution") will be that. Nintendo knows innovation. Top-tier Nintendo titles (like Mario and Link titles) always have a special level of polish not seen even mammoth titles like Halo or GTA. Nintendo fun crosses ages and is accessible to the veteran and new gamer alike.

But most of all, I want gaming to be different. I want gaming to be fresh and smart and inspiring to the sectors in the soul that thrive on creative engagement. I want bright colors and innovation, as when I put in Ocarina of Time in my Nintendo 64 for the first time and gasped looking at the fictional land of Hyrule. I've had enough of thug gaming and shooting creatures into puddles of goo. I want big smile thrills as when I made Mario fly for the first time in Super Mario 64. Games have so much potential as engaging art, as storytelling devices, as islands of interactive wonder. I want Iwata-san to stand up at GDC and announce the old way of gaming is dead: here is fun as we remember it and as we can enlarge it.

Besides, rooting for the underdog is fun.