Shigeru Miyamoto
Remember the first time that you beat Bowser in “Super Mario Bros.”? Or how about the first time you got the Master Sword in “The Legend of Zelda”? What about the first time you finished your first work out in “Wii Fit”? Well, each of those memories, as well as countless more are courtesy of one man, the Senior Managing Director at Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto. He started making games back in the early 1980’s with “Donkey Kong,” or “Jumpman” as it was called in Japan, and has been making classic game after classic game ever since. Mr. Miyamoto recently took time out of his very busy schedule to sit down and talk with a group of journalists in New York City about the upcoming release of “New Super Mario Bros. Wii,” as well as the recently released “Wii Fit Plus.”
He started by talking about what Nintendo attempted to accomplish with their update to the uber-successful “Wii Fit,” and then moved on to the meat of the discussion, “New Super Mario Bros. Wii,” where he talked about, and demonstrated some of the key new features of the game and then took questions from the twenty journalists that were there to see him. Check out ten of the most interesting bits from the conversation:
On “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”’s Difficulty:
“I remember at the roundtable at E3 this year, somebody asked, “Is New Super Mario Bros. Wii going to be as easy as Super Mario Bros. was on DS?” But I think what we’ve created this time is in fact pretty difficult.”
On the Super Guide, “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”’s new assist mode:
“…there is a help mode in the game called Super Guide. And what happens is, after you die eight times in a level, this block will appear (at the beginning of the level). So you’re playing at home, and maybe you’re not as experienced in Mario games as some people, and you die many times in a level, this block will appear and you can choose to activate the Super Guide.
So the walkthrough is after you die eight times in one level, and then when activated, you see a video of Luigi running through the level that you’re on… at any point in watching the video, you can also pause the game and take control.”
On why Princess Peach is not a playable character:
“Well, originally I thought it would be nice to have Princess Peach in there as a playable character, but in fact, the Toad characters have a physique that’s a little bit closer to Mario and Luigi. And in particular if we had one character out of the four that wore a dress, we would have to have a special programming to handle how the skirt is handled in the gameplay (laughs).
And that’s the only reason that Princess Peach is not there. Of course, if we had Wario in there, we’d have to program him to fart.”
On “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”’s rewards and unlockables:
People who clear every level without ever having a Super Guide block appear will get a little something special on the title screen of the game. There are different stars that you can receive on the title screen depending on what you’ve done in the game, and that’s one of them.
As long as we’re talking about things that you can unlock: As you go through the game there are three star coins in every level. As you collect the star points, you can then use the star coins to unlock additional movies that are also created using a system similar to the Super Guide system. These are called Hint Movies. And these Hint Movies will show the highest level of gameplay that our own internal testers and developers have been able to achieve in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. And they show things like super skills and infinite one-ups and secret goals as well as the locations of star coins and things like that.
On the death of Captain Lou Albano, the actor that portrayed Mario on the Saturday morning TV show “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show”:
Question: Where were you when you heard Captain Lou Albano passed away and what was your reaction?
Miyamoto: You’re the one who just told me
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
On “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”’s Special New Box:
“…it’s the first all-red Wii case. And the American version has a nice special foil stamp over the Wii logo. In Japan, it’s just white (laughs). We do have this nice special box for you so we hope you all take advantage of it, and rush out and buy the game.”
On What Makes a Mario Game a Mario Game:
So to me, what’s really important about a Mario game is that it be simple to control and easy to understand. And that when you as the player is playing the game, the physics in the game are understandable to you, so that when you hold the controller, you play it in a way that you understand what you’re supposed to do, you understand the environment, and then you begin to unleash your own gameplay creativity. You try different things. The response that you get from the environment into what you attempted to do in the world feels natural to you, and ultimately the game itself becomes kind of a back and forth between us the developers in trying to expect what types of creative things you might try to do as a player and you the player in terms of the response that you’re expecting to get in the game. And to me, a Mario game is really unleashing the player’s creativity within the world that you’ve created.
On “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”’s New Multiplayer Modes:
“…there are two dedicated multiplayer modes, one of which is free-for-all, which lets you select the stages from story mode in a menu-based system with images from each stage so you can easily find the stage you like. And then there’s also a coin battle mode which is a competitive multiplayer mode, in which you’re actually competing for points and you’re getting ranked based on how many points you’ve collected.
The free-for-all mode has kind of a similar feel to something like ‘Mario Kart’ where you just happen to have four people over and you want to sit down and play a quick match in your favorite level, and so you can use that to jump in.
And the levels that you cleared in the story mode unlock as you work your way through the story mode. I would say that they all become available in free-for-all mode.
The coin battle mode is a different structure. In the free-for-all mode you earn points and collect points, and the points you earn are based on things you stomp and things like that. Coin battle is based strictly on the number of coins that you get. So it’s very close to the original concept of the original ‘Mario Bros.’”
On Multiplayer Game Faces:
“…what we noticed in watching people play the game, is when people were playing alone, they had a very serious look on their face, and they were working very hard trying to figure out their way through the level. And it was a very big challenge for them. And as soon as we had multiple people playing the game, their expressions changed dramatically, and all of sudden, they had smiles on their faces, they were talking and jabbering back and forth and having a lot of fun playing the game that way.”
On What It Takes To Develop 2D Games Vs. 3D Games:
“I don’t think everything necessarily needs to be in 3-D, or that just because we’re seeing more 2-D games now (that) everything’s necessarily going to suddenly shift and go back to 2-D. Instead, I think maybe what’s going on is people are realizing the benefits of a 3-D game, and I think at the same time, I think people are remembering what the benefits of a 2-D game were. And in particular, with a game like ‘New Super Mario Bros. Wii,’ I think when you’re looking at the multiplayer in this game, the multiplayer platforming I think is much better suited to a 2-D environment than a 3-D one. I think that people probably going forward, at least on the development side, look at what their objectives of their games are and make the decisions based on the experience they have now and what the benefits are of each style.
But I think to really make the decision to go 2-D, you have to have the courage to not be so attached to the visual appearance of the game. And really be kind of pursuing more the gameplay experience. Because if you’re concerned about how the game will be viewed because of its visual appearance, then obviously everybody’s going to go more into 3-D and a more graphically impressive type of project. So you do have to have the courage to determine what your priorities are and where you want to put your focus.”
These are just a few of the more interesting tidbits from the roundtable, but Mr. Miyamoto had a lot more to say about his next game, including everything from the possibility of user created levels in the future to why there’s no online multiplayer in the game. If you’d like to read a full transcript of the discussion, you can check it out here, and for additional coverage, don’t forget to check out MTV’s Multiplayer Blog, who will have more with their one-on-one interview with Mr. Miyamoto all week.
