Above: Super Mario 3D World for the Wii U.
Making a Mario game in 2013
In the ’80s, Mario was unstoppable. His charming mug was found on every type of merchandise imaginable. His worldwide fame even survived the release of a terrible live-action movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. No other video game character could have hoped to match his popularity.
Today, that clearly isn’t the case. In terms of recognition, he faces stiff competition from Rovio’s Angry Birds, who also have an aggressive licensing team (the birds will even appear in their own film in 2016). The gaming audience has expanded with the rise of new business models (free-to-play), powerful mobile devices (smart phones and tablets), and of course, new consoles from rivals Microsoft and Sony.
Despite this ever-changing climate, it doesn’t sound like Nintendo has tweaked its development process for Mario games all that much. According to Koizumi, the methods behind making these titles do change from one game to the next, but only a little.
“But in the past — for example, let’s say for Super Mario 64 — it wasn’t just a matter of like, ‘Oh, we need to make a Mario game!,’” said Koizumi. “But rather, [it was] ‘What can we do this time? What’s an interesting play experience?’ We get a few ideas together and we create a proposal for Miyamoto. And that’s usually the start; that gives us the main direction that the game development is going to go in from that point. … We do lots of tests and different kinds of gameplay just to see what feels good. And when we find some ideas that work, we pull those together and that becomes the skeleton of the game.”
He was reluctant to reveal the size of EAD Tokyo — who focuses purely on the 3D Mario titles, while a separate group in Kyoto does the 2D games — saying only that they were big enough to “play baseball.” They may work on different projects at any given time, but for now, they’re concentrating on shipping Super Mario 3D World.
Above: Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U.
It was clear from our conversation that Mario is still Miyamoto’s baby. He lives in Kyoto, but visits EAD Tokyo once a month, where he gives feedback on their projects. Sometimes, that feedback is exquisitely detailed, especially when it came to Super Mario 3D World’s new cat suit, which lets the characters attack with their claws and climb up walls. Miyamoto is a cat owner, so he had something to say about how Mario and his friends should move when using it: The developers changed some of the animation to reflect Miyamoto’s “very specific observations of cat behavior.”
“Introducing a new suit breaks the rules of the world that we have established up until this point,” explained Koizumi. “It introduces new gameplay that wasn’t present before, so we always have to be a little bit nervous about what that could mean for how the game changes.”
While they don’t have a specific set of guidelines for what they can and can’t do with Mario, they have to treat the plumber’s legacy — and the expectations that players have formed from those past games — carefully.
Above: Mario and Luigi: Dream Team for the 3DS.
“I guess one thing that we do have to keep in mind is the main character of a game is the player,” said Koizumi. “They have to be able to see themselves in that character. We have to have a little bit of a neutral starting point. It can’t ever get too specific. We don’t spend a lot of time, for example, building up the character in the sense of, ‘This is Mario. He really loves pizza. He broke his left leg as a child.’
“We can’t do very specific elements that are going to take people out of a situation where they can apply themselves to that character. So in that sense, anything that makes the games harder to create in the future would be something we have to avoid.”