If you ever want to convince yourself that the entertainment industry is doomed, why not grab a sheet of paper and spend the afternoon trying to define exactly what "fun" is. This, after all, is what game companies in particular are meant to make their money selling to us. But what is it? What are its characteristics and components? Why do some find it in manipulating every heavily researched lever and dial of a submarine simulator, while others seek it in the pure abstraction of Rez or Tetris?
Just as it seems that "fun" must be hopelessly subjective, another difficult word to add to the list next to big hitters like "art" and "love", along comes a game with almost universal appeal, a game so disarming and ridiculous, so seemingly slight, that you'd be forgiven for assuming it didn't contain any insights into anything at all. But Made In Wario is a rare beast: fun that practically everybody agrees about.
At first glance, that might seem surprising. Nearing release, Made In Wario looked so willfully niche not even hardcore Nintendo fans were sure what they'd make of it. Hundreds of individual games? Five-second playing times? One-word instructions? How could it work?
In fact, it works almost flawlessly. Wario reduces four decades of videogaming to first principles, cutting away the clutter and dilution, the apocalyptic storylines, the bulk and bloat that have weighed so many titles down. All that's left is the simple notion of pressing a button and making something happen, that vital piece of DNA that has powered every game since Spacewar.
Although it's overflowing with ideas, Wario has embraced the lost art of brevity, cramming heroics, sports, car chases, fireworks, humor and surprise into the length of time it takes most people to tie their shoelaces. It's a game about games, reveling in every limitation of the form and parodying Nintendo"s own back catalogue.
It's about history, too, a title that could only be produced when gaming had achieved a kind of critical mass of nostalgia and established conventions. it's a game that you may feel you"ve been spending your whole life practicing for, and yet non-gamers can take to it as easily as Minesweeper.
Early reviews were positive but often slightly baffled, lauding it for its humor but regularly missing the wider significance. After all, important games are meant to feel important when you first play them: most titles announce their own magnitude with all the subtlety of Wagner presiding over global thermonuclear war.
Although most reviewers put a brave face on it, confusion reigned. Most disconcerting, and a sign that the industry may have steadily been losing its way all these years, is that the greatest hurdle Made In Wario had to overcome was that it initially seemed too entertaining. It wasn't just fun—it was too much fun to be respectable, too much fun to be taken seriously.
That hasn't stopped it from bringing serious change to the industry, however. That laughable oddball turned out to be the defining battle in a very Nintendo-styled war. This, it seems, was the real revolution, and its novel approach—bite-sized, gimmick gaming to fit in around your normal life—has been massively influential.
How much of Nintendo's new strategy—the success of the DS and Wii, and even, to a certain extent, the industry-wide craze for casual gaming—can be traced back to this starting point? Mario may still be the company mascot, but it might be Wario who's worth more in the long run, as his catalogue of new moves like prodding, poking and sneezing start to really rival jumping and running in gamers' affections.
Obvious in hindsight, it was still a gamble. The danger of taking 40 years of gaming conventions apart in as swift and clear-eyed a manner as Nintendo did is that you run the risk you'll be left with nothing but a handful of useless nuts and bolts that may not fit back together again.
Reducing games to mere button presses, a space-chimp's educational diet of simple cause and effect, might have easily become a thoroughly depressing exercise.