MARIO ROULETTE
by Andrew Fisher (@merman1974)
Japan has some tough laws on gambling, designed to keep organised crime (yakuza) at bay. Most forms of gambling are illegal, with just four sports that allow betting under strict controls. The four kōei kyōgi (public sports) are horse racing, powerboat racing, bicycle racing and Auto Race (motorbike speedway on an asphalt track – the riders compete under an alias and must live in a dormitory with other riders, to prevent communicating tips to the outside). The prefectures are permitted to run small lotteries, and toto (known in other countries as football pools, predicting the results of several soccer matches with a drawn game worth the most) is also legal. So, most Japanese experience the thrill of gambling through Game Centers (the equivalent of arcades, but with key differences) and pachinko parlours.
Rows of machines in a pachinko parlour.
Pachinko is of course the game where you feed metal balls into a machine in the hope of winning more metal balls. These balls are engraved with the parlour’s logo or a code to prevent you taking them elsewhere. In the bigger parlours you press a “call button” on the machine to trade in your balls for a voucher. This voucher is then exchanged at a booth or a neighbouring “prize parlour” for the actual prizes. The law that allows pachinko to avoid classification as gambling means that actual cash must not change hands. You effectively “rent” the balls and return them. Addiction to pachinko is common, and at a much higher rate compared to other forms of gambling outside Japan.
Mario tackles a pachinko-inspired level during Super Mario Sunshine.
Geesen (the Japanese abbreviation for Game Center) evolved to spread across several floors of a building. Video games would be on one floor and medal games on another. Medal games were a way to get round the gambling restrictions. You either paid money into the machine or bought metal tokens to play. The payout was in medals, exchanged at the prize booth. Horse racing games in particular were very popular. And so this is where Mario enters the story, with a 1991 medal game created on Konami’hardware.
A game center floor filled with medal games.
Mario Roulette is heavily influenced by the console game Super Mario World. The attract sequence shows a scrolling landscape similar to SMW, with the Mario Roulette logo appearing instead. And the actual gameplay of Roulette is inspired by one of SMW’s Bonus Games. In the console game, a series of eight blocks move around a central block and Mario headbutts the outer blocks to stop their icons rotating. Making complete lines of an icon by matching the central square earns either that power-up, extra Coins or 1-Up mushrooms.
The gambling bonus game from Super Mario World that may have helped inspire Mario Roulette.
Mario Roulette’s version is much simpler. The nine blocks are static but the icons still rotate. Pressing the button on the machine stops the outer eight blocks rotating. The player then has to time stopping the central block to complete lines vertically, horizontally and diagonally. The more lines, the bigger the payout in medals – with Mario striking a victory pose and the “bonus clear” music from SMW. Fail to complete lines or stop the central icon on Bowser, and Mario “dies” with the accompanying death music. Hitting Bowser turns all the blocks into Bowser with an ominous piece of music. Getting Peach in the central square gives a BIG WIN and more medals.
A Mario Roulette machine, the title page and the tutorial.
The graphics are based on Super Mario World and its power-up icons. The Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, Cape Feather and Star represent increasing values of payout in that order. Peach and Bowser appear as icons too, with only Mario (and the Yoshi he rides) being animated. The game does have a short tutorial on starting, which is all in Japanese. Players could pay 10 and 100 yen coins into the machine but only ever got the medals out. By inserting more than one coin, the player could win more – or lose more.
Losing to Bowser, winning coins, and a BIG WIN coming up with Peach.
The hardware in Mario Roulette is known as Konami Kids Medal Machine Type-1. The main processor is an NEC Z80, clocked at 6MHz (while the board itself runs at 24MHz). There is built-in security to prevent the board being used in a different cabinet. Currently there are three other machines known to run on this hardware. Slime Kun (Suraimu-kun in Japanese) sees a warrior trying to rescue the Princess from red Slimes that are seemingly inspired by the classic Dragon Quest character. This machine has three buttons to play Janken (Rock, Paper, Scissors) and dispenses gachapon (small figures in a plastic ball that can be opened) for winning. Tsurikko Penta (translated as Penta’s Fisherman) sees beloved penguin mascot Pentaro trying to catch fish to earn medals. He must avoid hooking tin cans, octopus and whales. Like Mario Roulette, those two games were released in 1991.
The Konami Kids circuit board, two images from Slime Kun and the penguin goes fishing in Tsurikko Penta.
The other title, Whoo Yarth Taar, dates back to 1990 and is even more obscure. The two screenshots on System16.com are baffling. Three pigs armed with sticks are standing in front of doors. It looks like the player must have to press one of three buttons to hit people who open the doors, and from the onscreen displays it appears you have to score a number of “correct” hits (lighting up at the top of the screen) or risk losing “energy” (the row of hearts at the bottom). The name appears in lists of Konami’s games online but frustratingly there are almost no references to how the game actually works.
Who knows what is going on in Whoo Yarth Taar?
While it may seem strange to see Mario in the context of a gambling game, it is not the only example. 1991 also saw another medal game called Mario World, and there was a Super Mario 64 slot machine. Japan has now given the go-ahead for three officially licensed casinos in major cities, so companies like Konami (who are now heavily into manufacturing pachislot machines) will have a key outlet for new gambling games. There are many gaming franchises represented in pachislot and pachinko machines, even Resident Evil (Biohazard in its native Japan).
The Biohazard pachislot machine.
At the time of writing there has been a major development in the story of Mario Roulette. In December 2019, Eric Chung (Shoutime) dumped the machine’s ROM and made it available to the Google group for MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). A YouTube video of an early attempt at emulating the game in MAME emerged in January 2020 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmzuAp-lfzA, which did show some problems. When MAME version 0.218 was released on February 1st 2020, it officially supported the full emulation of the Mario Roulette ROM with the problems having been corrected. So now you can “play” Mario Roulette in the comfort of your own home – but with no chance of a physical payout in shiny medals…
I was watching a British television documentary recently called Our Guy In Japan, featuring motorbike racer and mechanic Guy Martin as he undertook a fact-finding trip around the country. He was given the chance to try Auto Race and met the racers – as well as being given a guide to a “slum” area where the yakuza were a big presence. That piqued my interest in Japanese gambling laws and I looked up more on the subject. And when I saw the title Mario Roulette in the list of games to feature in the Multiverse collaboration, I thought it stood out as one that people would not have heard of.
With thanks to Super Mario Wiki for their informative article on Mario Roulette – https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Roulette
And System16 for more information – https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=568
Andrew Fisher is a freelance writer specialising in retro games, with a personal collection of over 3,000 retro games across many formats. He is a regular contributor to Retro Gamer magazine – https://www.retrogamer.net, and writes the More C64 column for The Retrogaming Times website – https://www.classicplastic.net/trt/. His book The Commodore 64 Games Book 1982-19xx, featuring over two hundred game reviews, was published in 2008. He recently completed over 700 SNES game reviews (including several Picross games) for the Super Nintendo Anthology from Geek-Line Publishing. He has contributed music and been a games tester for newly released C64 games. He has been working on a book project with fellow writer Jerry Ellis, titled Arcade Imperfect, due for publication in 2020. Andrew is 45, married to Alison and helps look after his stepdaughter Madalyn.
[Caption: Andrew has written for the recent ZZAP! 64 Annuals, reviving the old magazine with new reviews and features. Photo processed with the Retrospecs app.]
Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more:
Thank you for such a remarkably detailed and interesting look at this! I knew a little about pachinko but hadn’t thought about everything beyond