http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/splatoon/0/0
Highlights
Iwata You’re all wearing matching t-shirts.
Nogami Oh yes, we are. (laughs)
Sakaguchi It was just a coincidence. (laughs)
Iwata It doesn’t look like a coincidence to me. (laughs)
All (laughs)
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Iwata So you all got together to make a new kind of game, something that wasn’t Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda.
Nogami Right. Of course there were other members of the team who aren’t here right now. All of us got together almost every day and brainstormed ideas for a new game. I think we had over fifty ideas...
Inoue We had at least seventy ideas.
Iwata Seventy ideas? How long did it take you to think of that many? Nogami About six months.
Iwata That’s a lot of ideas.
Nogami We were all pretty competitive about our brainstorming.
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Iwata Tofu?
Nogami Yes. (laughs) There was a white thing and a black thing shaped like blocks of tofu, and they were shooting ink and they had to steal each other’s turf.
Iwata So at first it wasn’t squid at all. It was black and white tofu shooting each other with ink. (laughs)
Nogami Right. (laughs)
Iwata But tofu is usually white.
Sakaguchi The black one was sesame tofu! (laughs)
Sato So the basis of Splatoon was a fight between a block of sesame tofu and a block of firm tofu. All (laugh)
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Nogami We only remembered it later on. Like, "Oh yeah, there was a water gun in Super Mario Sunshine." As Nintendo employees, that’s pretty embarrassing. (laughs)
Iwata But the structure of the game is completely different, after all. And this wasn’t an idea that could have come from Super Mario Sunshine. Nogami Right. We wanted to come up with the play structure from scratch and then create a design to match the structure. So we didn’t really want to borrow a pre-existing character.
Iwata So how did you find a way out of your struggle?
Nogami We tried switching the character from humans to rabbits.
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Iwata The strong foundation allowed you to fill the game world with things you all loved.
Nogami That’s right. And it’s the same thing with the music. Our idea was that in the game world the ink-splattering turf wars are something kind of cool and rebellious, like skate boarding. So we added rock music because it fit the image we had. We were really able to add all the things that we thought would work well. In a way, we might have even gotten a little too carried away! (laughs)
Amano Even if we did get a bit carried away, we stayed true to our basic concept of the action game where you can switch between a human and a squid.
Iwata That’s how strong it was.
Amano Right. It was strong enough that no matter what we added to that concept, it didn’t waver.
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Iwata Now let’s move on to a totally different topic. To an outsider at last year’s E3, it seemed as though Splatoon was already complete.
Nogami Yes.
Iwata It’s taken about ten months from then to get to where the game is now, but I think there were a lot of people who were dying to play the game after E3. What were you all doing for ten months?
Sakaguchi The game was only about 10% complete at E3.
Amano It was only 10% complete, or should we say, we still had about 90% left of the game to make.
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Amano So we all worked hard for ten months to add depth to the game, but there was something we were worried about.
Iwata What was that?
Amano We were worried that people would mistake the game for a shallow game for beginners, because it’s kind of cute looking. Oh, of course it’s really important that beginners play the game too, only that we worried, "The game might come across as easygoing."
Nogami Like, "Isn’t this for kids?" A
mano Right. Because of how it looks, some people might think "Does this game have any depth?" but they shouldn’t worry. The game gives a lot back to a player who wants to get invested in it.
Sakaguchi We’ve been playing and still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it. I just keep sinking deeper in, and I’ve still got a long way to go.
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Amano And the ending to the single-player mode is really great.
Sakaguchi Right! (laughs)
Amano The contents are a secret, but...I really want people to finish single-player mode and check it out. I think that when we got carried away, like Nogami-san talked about earlier, we put most of it in that ending. The other thing I’d really like to recommend is that people try out all kinds of weapons. If they keep using the same weapon, they’ll never understand the unique features of their enemy’s weapon.
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