Gaming Rivals Team Up

Mar 28, 05:00 AM

Current Headlines: By Mike Snider

Mario the plumber and Sonic the Hedgehog, rivals in the video game world for two decades, will team up for the first time in a game based on the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, due in stores this holiday season for Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld system (prices not yet set), will also include other popular characters such as Luigi and Yoshi (from Nintendo's Mario games), as well as Knuckles and Tails (from the Sonic games), all competing in such summer Olympic events as running, swimming and table tennis.

"This is something we've been talking about for two to three years now but never really had quite the right opportunity," says Simon Jeffery of Sega, which secured video game licenses for the upcoming summer games. "With (that), we started thinking of some way to take advantage of the Wii and DS, and then magic happened."

Rumors of a Mario-Sonic collaboration have been around since Sega quit making video game consoles itself in 2001. Back in 1991, Sega's release of Sonic the Hedgehog provided a much-needed power boost to the Sega Genesis system, then in hot combat with Nintendo.

By that time, Mario was well on his way to appearing in nearly 100 games and selling more than 193 million video games. He first appeared as "Jumpman" in 1981 in the arcade game Donkey Kong. Then in 1985, the game Super Mario Bros. helped fuel the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System and became the top-selling game of all time (40 million worldwide; some came bundled with the NES). That game is credited with helping the video game industry's resurgence after its crash several years earlier.

To catch the attention of the Sega Genesis' target market, a slightly older, edgier consumer, Sega's designers created Sonic with "attitude and speed, to kick things up a notch in the video game character wars," Jeffery says. Eventually, Sonic games sold more than 44 million worldwide and the character appeared in an animated TV series and comic books (Mario also had his own TV series for a time, and a 1993 live-action movie starring Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper bombed).

The new Olympics game, to be designed by Sega with oversight by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, will make unique use of the Wii's motion-sensitive controller. "It's going to be very interactive and fairly physical," says Jeffery, adding that more will be revealed in coming months.

Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan says the gameplay will involve "something that has not yet been imagined on Wii and DS."

This Nintendo-Sega collaboration is another coup for Nintendo, which has strengthened its hold on the handheld game market with the dual-screened DS and so far outdueled Sony's PlayStation 3 with the Wii.

At Wedbush Morgan Securities, Michael Pachter calls the game "a pretty big announcement" in that the two companies are teaming up on the game and Nintendo is sharing its intellectual property. "You are looking at a genre-widening partnership." (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.