Word: marios
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...video-game industry, which convenes this week in Los Angeles for the giant Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), has been waiting nearly three years for this game. It stars a familiar character--a stumpy, mustachioed plumber named Mario--but it runs on a new machine so powerful, so blisteringly fast, so graphically rich that it could be single-handedly running out of lives...
They are. Hours after Super Mario 64 arrived in Seattle, TIME correspondent David S. Jackson took it and several other games for a test run. Playing Mario 64, he reports, is like jumping inside the movie Toy Story. The plot line, something about a princess and a bad guy named Bowser, is, as always, almost irrelevant. What matters is that the Silicon Graphics chip-fueled Nintendo 64 puts the fastest, smoothest game action yet attainable via joystick at the service of equally virtuoso motion. Mario runs, flies, swims, dodges and flips his way past a bewildering welter of walls, ramps...
...once, the movement on the screen feels real. Nudge the stick forward, Mario walks: clump-clump-clump. Press it a bit more, he leans forward and trots: clop-clop-clop-clop. Push it all the way, he runs faster and faster, tiny legs pumping in unison with his body, his rising speeds a seamless gradation of motion...
...except to wink and say, as Lincoln does, that it "will be making announcements in the near future." But it's not hard to imagine tens of millions of Americans a few years from now surfing the World Wide Web through their video-game players with Sonic and Mario at their side...
Many admirers referred to those qualities last week, but Mario Cuomo's son Andrew probably captured them best when he recalled a visit to Los Angeles in March 1993, when Brown and Cuomo were delivering an aid package to the city. Outside a sporting-goods shop staffed by former gang members, Cuomo and Brown played basketball with the ex-gangsters for the benefit of the TV cameras. "The gang people were big," said Cuomo. "This was not going to be much of a contest. So Ron took the ball, and with the cameras rolling, he set up at half court...