Sonic The Hedgehog Character Profiles

Questions for Jeff Ryan

In the summer of 2002, I played a game called Tetris Attack on a SNES every single day. It didn't matter to me that the game system was more than a decade past its prime or whether the sun was shining—an addict, I would play against my college friends and we'd spar over the controllers. Of course we weren't the only ones attached to the games that Nintendo created in the '80s and '90s. Experts still consider those games some of the greatest ever made in terms of their level of difficulty and sheer inventiveness.

: I know you weren't a gaming obsessive, before you started reporting on video games. How did you get interested in Mario?

Jeff Ryan : I got a copy-editing job at a pop-culture website. I'd come in at 8:30 every day, but no one had any copy for me until 11 or 12. I asked my boss if there was anything I could do, and she gave me a press release about a Pokémon tournament. So I wrote it up, 250 words, and she said, OK this is fine. Then, two minutes later, I hear her on the phone with the freelancer who normally did the video game reviews, saying that she's hired a video game expert. And I thought: Is that me? Because I rewrote a Pokémon press release?

: Can you tell me a little more about Nintendo's first inroads into American culture?

Ryan : Nintendo of America—which a lot of people think of as Nintendo [though the company's headquarters is in Kyoto, Japan]—was a six-person operation based in Washington that started in 1980. They invested in a game called Radar Scope, which is pretty much forgotten now. They had 3,000 [arcade] cabinets made, and they only sold 1,000. So they needed to do something with the other 2,000. Nintendo pulled out the guts and decided to put in a new motherboard with a totally different game. Radar Scope was a Space Invaders knock off, and they were going to do something else. All their game designers were busy doing other stuff, so they got the guy who was painting the cabinets to design a game for them. And that was Donkey Kong. The guy who was painting the cabinets was Shigeru Miyamoto, who is now the world's greatest video game designer.

Slate 's Nick Paumgarten describes him as a "folk hero"), or was it a combination of both those things?

Ryan : I think it's the avatar idea. If you play as Mario, you put yourself in Mario's shoes.