I really enjoyed the discussions this week surrounding the mysterious casual gamer and the multilateral voice of the lapsed gamer. It got me thinking a lot about the idea of there being a collective cultural consciousness that to an extent defines what is popular; a vague mass awareness surrounding a title or brand such as Mario Kart that helps make it such a commercial success.
Something I heard one my elder relatives saying the other day was that the Wii is a success story due to its ability to appeal to all ages, and the more I think about it the more I believe this to be true - it's cliched to call Nintendo a brand aimed at kids, but Mario is of course heavily linked with kids. It was a clever move to leave Mario or any other established Nintendo franchise out of Wii Sports in my opinion, as it seems to me that in much the same way as I might be put off going to see a film due to its Disney branding (and Disney know it - that's why they have Miramax), there is something inherently connected to children's appeal in Mario's image and what he represents, which might be offputting to those who either had no experience of Mario as a child, or were too old or disengaged from gaming to be involved or engaged by any of his outings. By leaving out the typical Nintendo franchise elements from Wii Sports (overtly at least) and engaging with sports which have universally known rules and conventions, Wii Sports became an even more accessible product, particularly for those with no interest in Mario or videogames in a broader sense. Perhaps this can go some way to explaining the relatively lacklustre commercial reaping of Mario Super Sluggers compared with that of Tiger Woods 09 - the tropes of the Mario world placed in a baseball context cannot be a logical expansion on Wii Sports' Baseball to an audience such as the Wii's who evidently weren't willing to buy Gamecubes in droves based on the strength of Nintendo's marquee franchises.
As for what Greg was saying about Mario Kart Wii selling so incredibly well to the people who own the system, it seems to me that once the initial barrier of ownership has been broken down (by an incredible system seller like Wii Sports for example) then selling individual games for the console is far less of a challenge to overcome. When I was young (during the late SNES/N64 period) franchises including Mario Kart achieved a great deal of playtime, and notoriety with the more hardcore-ey youngsters I knew (let's face it - hardcore is a pure synonym for geek) and that spread through their siblings and friends to the extent where pretty much everyone I know, game player or not, has, when they were young, played MK64 with their cousins or something. Another example was several years ago, when I remember a guy at school bringing in his X-Box and getting a crowd of about 15 people to play splitscreen Halo during the school break and lunchtime. I'd never played Halo before or since, but the fond memory of that experience means that if I were ever to be persuaded to buy a Microsoft console - and current offerings haven't done that - I would almost certainly pick up whatever Halo game was readily available for it because the name has a positive reasonance with me.
So basically what I'm trying to argue is that the glut of sales for Mario Kart Wii, far exceeding that of previous Mario Kart entries, is due in part to more people having gotten past the huge hurdle that is the console purchase. This of course, severely limits the choice of game purchasing options for all but the slim percentage of people who will only buy more than one home console per generation. Hence with Nintendo's foot in the door, certain properties have been able, in various isolated examples (with NewSuper Mario Bros Wii looking to be the next prime candidate, in Japanat least), to leverage collective cultural memories and experiences inorder to push sales figures that branch out beyond the blood allegianceof Nintendo fans, to all the brothers and sisters, the cousins and theschoolmates. This is one of the key differences between the Wii and what we saw with the Gamecube, which couldn't succeed commercially with its stable of first party franchises alone.
It seems to me that the Wii's motion controls are sometimes falsely accorded praise as being the sole contributing factor that made and continues to make the Wii successful. Not to say that motion controls are not a part of the Wii's identity, however we are about to see Sony and Microsoft attempt entry into the motion control space, yet if they can't capitalise on the tastes of a particular audience in the same way Nintendo has, then I suspect things shan't go too comfortably.