LOS ANGELES — Shigeru Miyamoto has a lot on his mind.
In a one-on-one interview at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, the head of Nintendo’s game design department and creator of Mario touched on a wide variety of topics: His new Mario and Zelda games, of course, but also what he thinks of the competition’s new camera-based motion controllers, which are intended to compete with Wii.
The full Q&A is below.
Wired.com: I’m really into Wario Ware: DIY. Have you made any games with it?
Shigeru Miyamoto: I made some games, but I’m pretending like I didn’t because they all turned out weird.
Wired.com: You said you had the idea to do a four-player Mario game for a long time. Had you ever actually done any prototypes of such a game on other hardware?
Miyamoto: With each (Mario) project, we do different experiments. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. We’ve done games in the past where we’ve had the idea and worked on it. But with side-scrolling games, the challenge was that the screen continues to scroll forward, and what happens when the other player falls off the screen? With Mario 64, we had an experiment that took advantage of the idea of the screen growing larger and smaller depending on how far apart the characters were. So we had Mario and Luigi running around in that 3-D world, but we ended up not using it.
There’s also the issue of the resolution of the graphics. If you were to try to do a system where the camera zoomed in and out, and the graphics grew and shrunk in relation to the camera, back on the NES, the resolution of the graphics there, if the Mario character got too small you wouldn’t be able to distinguish the character easily. But with the Wii, because the resolution of the graphics is strong enough, you can pull the camera back very far and still see the character.
Wired.com: Why did you decide not to use that Nintendo 64 game with Mario and Luigi?
Miyamoto: Ultimately, it’s the idea of processing speed and working within the constraints of the hardware. The DS Mario 64 had a mode with something similar to that, where you were playing with four characters.
Wired.com: With Microsoft and Sony introducing camera controllers, it’s interesting that Nintendo has never shown any sort of camera controller off. What’s your opinion on what the competition is doing?
Miyamoto: I’m sure you’re aware, but obviously this type of motion-sensing camera technology has been around for quite a while. Over the years we’ve looked at a variety of different technologies and seen what could be done with that, and ultimately made the decision not to take advantage of what they can do.
Of course, we’ve, in terms of looking at that, felt that it wasn’t time to take advantage of technology like that yet. Particularly from a cost standpoint, we don’t think the time is right. Of course, looking at what we’ve done with Wii Sports Resort, we feel that with Wii MotionPlus we feel that we’ve pursued a very deepened gameplay experience, and we’re delivering it in a way that’s cost-effective. And with up to four players, it’s very easy to purchase the initial devices. We think that overall, Wii Sports Resort is a very good real demonstration of what precise motion control can be.
Wired.com: Nintendo had done experiments with camera control in the past. What do you think of the idea of controlling a game with nothing, no controller, in your hands? Do you think that costs aside that that’s a good idea, or that you do need something physical to hold on to?
Miyamoto: You ask sharp questions, don’t you? As someone who thinks of things from the perspective of creating interactive experiences, I really think that you do need something. I don’t think as a creator that I could create an experience that truly feels interactive if you don’t have something to hold in your hand, if you don’t have something like force feedback that you can feel from the controller. That’s why I think the Wii remote, particularly with Wii MotionPlus, makes for such a strong experience.
I think that some of their designers are going to be faced with that question going forward, and they’ll have to find solutions to that, and perhaps that’s why you see for one of the devices that it’s not simply a camera, but that you’re holding some kind of wand with lights that change colors. I think those are interesting ideas, and there are interesting ways that that could be developed, but those are challenges that they’re still facing and trying to learn to overcome.
Raising a couple of examples, the archery in Wii Sports Resort feels very, very good. Another one that I think is very interesting is Frisbee. Because with Frisbee, you not only have that precision motion, but when you throw the Frisbee you hear that sound of the Frisbee flying through the air coming out of the Wii remote speaker. And that does an amazing job of making it feel like you’ve just thrown a Frisbee. We’ve been working with motion control for several years now, and have really learned how to take advantage of it and what can be done with it. Looking at what the other companies have shown here at E3, it feels like they have finally obtained the very basic technology for doing motion control, but perhaps they still have to learn how to use that and take advantage of it in an interactive experience.
Hopefully you won’t write this in too great detail. Maybe you won’t write that I said those things specifically.
Wired.com: Unfortunately, I’m planning on writing everything. And I have another sharp question: Super Mario Galaxy 2. I was surprised to see this announced, because as was said, typically Nintendo doesn’t do two Mario games on one console, and beyond that it’s a very straightforward follow-up with similar levels, which is something that we rarely see in the Mario series. Why the change in philosophy that says it’s ok to do a sequel?
Miyamoto: The biggest reason is because we simply hadn’t run out of ideas within the system that we’d created for Super Mario Galaxy. One of the biggest ideas that we felt we didn’t take good enough advantage of in the first one was “China Syndrome,” or the idea that if you drill a hole straight through the earth in one place, you would end up on the other side, so if you drill a hole from Tokyo you would end up in New York. We had some elements of that but the first thing that we did in Super Mario Galaxy 2 was to create the drill item that you saw in the trailer. We felt that as soon as we completed the drill item and began playing around with it, we felt that with just that one item there was a lot that we could do that would really make the game a lot of fun.
Wired.com: You’ve added Yoshi, which is something that people are really interested in. How does that change the gameplay mechanics?
Miyamoto: In Super Mario Galaxy, one of the features of the game was the pointer functionality — you were able to point at things in the game, and grab onto them, and pull yourself through, and things like that. We felt that was somewhat similar to one of the things that Yoshi could do, and in bringing Yoshi in, it felt like a new approach to it and that there was a lot of fun that could be had.
I think it’s kind of difficult for us to have Mario running around and carrying things in the world, but by incorporating Yoshi there’s a variety of different ways that we can have Yoshi carrying things and using that as a new gameplay element as well.
For the rest of the Interview Source
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