Where it all began…

In the beginning, there was God. And God created man.  A short man with a moustache, a red boiler suit and blue overalls, but a man nevertheless. Not best pleased with this, a rival God created a hyperactive blue hedgehog, and one of the greatest battles of all time ensued.

Now I know this isn’t strictly where it all began – table-top table tennis and maurading aliens aside, though, video games didn’t really take off in the UK until the advent of the home console. Perhaps we’re just not built to keep pumping coins into the slot like our cousins over the Atlantic (and maybe that’s why Blackpool never quite reached the same scale of Las Vegas) but the portly Italian-American plumber and his hedgehog nemesis were the first games to really capture our imagination in such a spectacular fashion.

I was trying to remember recently which game I played first, Sonic or Mario, as my sister received a NES as a gift around the same time as I received a Master System, and I honestly can’t remember, but I loved them both equally. In actual fact the first game I played on a home console may well have been Alex Kidd in Miracle World (as that was the pre-installed game on my Master System), but Alex never really competed with Mario in the way SEGA anticipated, so after four or five years of trailing in popularity, Alex was replaced by Sonic. Not that Miracle World wasn’t a great game you understand, but my word it was hard, and if you were doing too well it plain cheated, so Sonic was a breath of fresh air. It was fast, vibrant, fun, and moreover, if you died it was your own fault for not having developed reactions superhuman enough for the stage of the game you were upto.

Mario on the other hand was a more patient affair, but had the added bonus of being able to play in 2-player co-operative mode, and this was used to particularly brilliant effect in Super Mario Bros. 3 with the inclusion of a world map, equippable items, and so many things we would come to love in the Mario games over the years. By way of return fire, Sonic added a 2-player co-operative mode to Sonic 2 on the Megadrive console, using the console’s superior power to run the co-op in side-by-side split-screen, and it was blisteringly brilliant. Nintendo responded with Super Mario World on the higher-powered SNES console, which proved to be a huge hit and probably the first nail in Sonic’s coffin. This game was RPG-sized, was fairly free-form in how you could progress, and had that all important co-operative mode (that so many games miss out on today). Not only that, but it also was the game that introduced us to Yoshi, the unsung hero of the Mario series over the years, who has added so many extra dimensions to gameplay and kept the games so fresh (and has deservedly received a fair few spin-offs through the years).

And so it was that Mario flourished and Sonic drifted off into oblivion, and when Nintendo’s consoles kept going from strength to strength while SEGA’s fizzled away, it looked like it was all over for the first great war of the video game era. For all intents and purposes, it was over, when the Dreamcast floundered. But when all seemed to be finished, they surprised us, and I am more than glad to see SEGA back as a third-party software developer. I would have definitely missed Sonic, Tails et al from my screen had the games died off with the consoles, and while it’s nice to see tie-ins with Mario and Sonic sharing the billing, the difference in scale and budget definitely shows.

Nintendo produce some absolutely incredible Mario-franchise titles to go hand-in-hand with their consoles and handhelds – Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii are nothing short of spectacular, and the New Super Mario Bros. on the DS is a wonderful trip down memory lane and a leap forward in handheld terms. I’m really looking forward to some forthcoming SEGA titles, especially the new Sonic RPG (yes, that’s right – they’re marrying the fastest character in the history of videogames with the world’s most patient genre) but unless they pull their socks up, SEGA may get left behind all over again.