Trigger Happy
themed shoot-’em-ups that were popular at the time. But Miyamoto’s first game, called Donkey Kong (see fig. 3), became an enormous hit, and invented a new genre: the platform game.9
The carpenter, known cratylically as Jumpman (for it was his nature, uniquely at the time, to jump) in the first game, was transformed by its sequel into a plumber called Mario, who soon became the most recognized videogame “character” of all, and most of the innovations in the platform-game genre have been made in games starring Mario, and written by Miyamoto himself. Mario Bros. (1983) introduced the plumber’s brother, Luigi, along with another paradigm of platform gaming that stuck for years: enemies are destroyed, not by means of projectile weapons, but by the cartoonish method of jumping into platforms underneath them to knock them over, then climbing up and kicking them off the screen while they were still dazed. Super Mario Bros. (1985) turned the platform genre into a sideways-scrolling quest through a world many times the size of one screen, and added powerups (by eating a mushroom, Mario increased in size
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9 In platform games, women are literally on pedestals, with men constantly striving to attain their level. It is an interesting example of plinth ideology; see, for the concept’s application in cognitive science, the rather eccentric AndrÉ Tabrizifar, The Transparent Head, pp. 332–35.
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