When it comes to Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto is open to experiments but he also works with certain limits. He talked about some early worries he had for Super Mario Odyssey as well as how he comes up with new ideas and more in a recent interview.
Here’s what Miyamoto had to say about working with certain limits when it comes to working on Mario games:
“When it’s internal teams, they really understand it, although they try to push that line a little bit further. But when it’s an external partner, I make sure that line is very clear. I have times where I’m actually strangely open and it’s the team that’s worrying too much. But then other times, I’m really strict in certain other points.”
For Super Mario Odyssey, Miyamoto was specifically worried about the idea of Mario in New Donk City and the challenge behind it:
“I was worried about how players would react to being in a world where Mario is this tall and normal people are a little bit taller. Or the fact that people don’t get mad at Mario when he’s jumping up and down all over the place,” he says, laughing. “But with all that said, I think I realized that the character Pauline has already existed, and the idea of this game taking place in the city worked out really well. And so we ran with it.”
He then talked about coming up with new ideas, which generally starts with a simple core concept:
“I really start with the game mechanic, and then trying to make sure that the character that gets put into the game fits that mechanic,” he explains. “If you divide things into large categories, you could go the Mario route or the Zelda route. And then, for example, with a game like Luigi’s Mansion, I really thought that Luigi was the perfect fit for that game, and that’s how it manifested. And for characters like Pikmin, for the mechanic that current Pikmin games have, they were perfect.”
“In a sense, I really feel like I own this talent agency and I am casting all these great talent into these games.”
You can read the rest of the interview on Super Mario Odyssey and some more interesting tidbits on Shigeru Miyamoto over at IGN.
Super Mario Odyssey launches October 27, 2017 on the Nintendo Switch.
