Super Mario Galaxy, the first 3D Mario action game for Wii, will go on sale on November 1st (November 16th in Europe). I know there are quite a few people who question whether a 3D Mario action game is truly fit for Wii. So I have decided to ask the developers in detail about what went through their minds while they were creating this latest addition to the Mario series. By the way, this time around I have asked for help through this interview from (Akinori) Sao-san, the former editor-in-chief of the Nintendo Dream magazine and now a freelance writer. Sao-san, thank you for being with us today.

The pleasure is mine. Thank you for having me. Actually, it's been a full six years since I last talked with you up close like this.

Yes, I remember. That was the year the GameCube was released, and it was the very last work day of the year.

You remember so well! (laughs) Back then I had asked you to do an extended, full interview with me. Still, this time I feel a little nervous being involved in such a special occasion now that I am in a different position. But at the same time, I'm really excited that I get to hear about the true successor to the 3D Mario action game series from the various developers in this four-part interview.

Super Mario Galaxy was developed by our EAD (Entertainment Analysis and Development) Tokyo office. The staff were going through the peak of the development cycle during this interview, so I have decided to personally head over here to Tokyo. So this and the next interview, the first two of the four, will be brought to our readers as an interview special, "Iwata Asks (Business Trip Edition)". Now, for the first part of these interviews, I’d like to interview the producer and the director of the project. Please begin by introducing yourselves.

I am Shimizu, and I work as the producer at EAD Tokyo. For Super Mario Galaxy, my main task was to create a work environment where everyone in the staff could focus on development.

Hi, I am Koizumi, also from EAD Tokyo where I worked as the director for this project. Since Shimizu-san handled the task of communicating with all our outside sources, I was able to plunge right in and focus on development with the other staff members in the lab. Oh, and it was also my job to “interpret” (Shigeru) Miyamoto-san’s comments for the developers.

Now, please tell me how this project first started.

The story goes back to the year 2000. It was during the GameCube presentation event¹, where we revealed a demo called “Mario 128”².I was the director of that demo. After that event, I kept thinking of ways of somehow turning the system used in Mario 128 into a product. However, I had always thought that realizing this would be close to impossible.

1	The GameCube presentation event was held at SpaceWorld 2000, a video game trade show hosted by Nintendo, which was held at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan in August 2000.
2	Mario 128 is the name of the demo that offered a glimpse of the power of the GameCube. This demo is also known as “100 Marios”.

Why did you think this was impossible?

It was for technical reasons. In Mario 128, the platform was built in the shape of a flying saucer, but to change the platform into a spherical shape that Mario could freely roam around on would require a high level of technical expertise. I also felt that the motivation of the team members had to be very high in order to overcome this obstacle.

Incidentally, I had heard about the spherical platforms from Miyamoto-san more than five years ago, though at the time, I didn’t quite understand why having spherical platforms would be so ground-breaking. However, as Mario Galaxy began to take shape, I finally started to understand.

At the time, I felt the same way. It sounds interesting, but I wasn't sure whether or not it would be worth the effort. Thinking back, this probably was a thought that was shared by everyone in the staff. But Miyamoto-san kept saying over and over again that he wanted to make it happen.

So, about two years ago, after we were finished developing Donkey Kong Jungle Beat³ for the GameCube, we had some time to plan what our next game would be. I had suggested creating a new, original game on our own, but then Miyamoto-san said in a rather sad tone, "I wish you could make a game with Nintendo characters...". (laughs)

3	Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is a side-scrolling action game for the Nintendo GameCube which can be played with the DK Bongos, an optional bongo-shaped controller.

The EAD Tokyo office had just opened in 2003, and at the time, we didn't think we were able to make such a large-scale game. So, I had suggested plans for a rather smaller, compact game title. But then Miyamoto-san asked me "Don’t you want to work on something bigger?", so I asked the staff members for their opinions, and somebody in the team said how he wanted us to use our skills to make the next Mario game ourselves. By working on Jungle Beat together, I got to know the staff well enough by then, and I thought that with this team, we may just be able to tackle the new and difficult challenge of making spherical platforms work.

But the development process wasn't smooth.

Of course. I worked on this project thinking that I had taken on the role of the cook. First, I showed the recipe to everyone saying "I want to make this kind of dish on Wii", but nobody in the staff was able to imagine the finished plate.

So just showing them the recipe wasn't enough to get them to figure out whether the finished dish would taste good or not, then.

Miyamoto-san told me “This looks tasty”. However, almost everyone in the staff told me they couldn’t make a dish of this grandeur. Hearing that, I felt the need to make a sample plate. Gathering several staff members, we created a prototype that took about three months to make. A spherical shape would be best understood as a planet, so we put that in outer space and added gravity. It looked just like a bare minimum version of the current Super Mario Galaxy. That's where the development really took off.

So no matter how wonderful the recipe you show them may be, it’s a lot easier for everyone to understand the final dish once they’ve actually tried a sample, even if it’s just a small portion.

Correct. I look at this as if I had borrowed a vegetable garden from Miyamoto-san. It was as if I had asked him, "Please let me borrow your ‘secret garden’. I promise I will produce great things from it", and then started sowing the seeds with my staff members. Once we’d cooked the dish with the harvested crops, we decided to have Miyamoto-san be the first one to taste it. He is the owner of the garden, after all. We sent every plate to Kyoto for him to sample, and he gave us comments back like "This is a little too hot", or "This part tastes better now". Towards the end of development, we had him come and visit our "restaurant" in Tokyo. While he was here, we had him sample an unbelievable number of dishes. We had him eat until he was very full.

He ate every plate that we could throw at him; it must have been almost torturous for Miyamoto-san! (laughs)

So once we had the owner, Miyamoto-san, fairly satisfied with what he was being served, we had the general public try it out. We invited a large number of people to try it, and we invested a lot of time into this. By doing so, we adjusted the flavour while listening to our customers’ opinions and went on to complete the dish.

Still, you really did make the most use of Miyamoto-san that you could! (laughs)

Having him taste the dishes really helped us as cooks! (laughs)

For this title, I had asked Miyamoto-san to do only one thing, and that was to have Miyamoto-san do what only he could do. A 3D Mario action game hadn't come out in a long time, and I wanted him to make this into a game that would represent Wii.

So, even on days off, I sometimes received e-mails from him telling us to change this to that, and from early in the morning to boot! (laughs) Though we were working at distant locations from each other, I really didn't notice the distance that much this time. We even had a setup where the game, which was being worked on in Tokyo, would be accessible in Kyoto at the same time. Also, I was really grateful that towards the end of the development cycle he often came to the Tokyo office for us.

But I'm sure you had differences in opinion with Miyamoto-san from time to time, right?

That definitely happened. However, when it did happen, he would clearly explain to me why his suggestions were better, and at times, he would understand my point of view and we decided to go with what I was saying. Come to think of it, there was a time a while ago when I just wouldn’t budge no matter what, and I finally gave in when he said to me, "Just trust an old man’s experience!". (laughs)

Sometimes he does convince you like that. It’s never worked on me, though! (laughs)

Still, as a director, I became responsible for looking over the staff members, and sometimes recently I’ve caught myself telling the staff that they should listen to an old man’s opinions too! (laughs)

Last year at the release of Wii, a lot of people were asking for a new 3D Mario release. When the GameCube was released, there definitely were people saying that if Super Mario Sunshine⁴ was released at launch, things may have been different. I think Mario games are fated to have that much riding on them. This time, Super Mario Galaxy will be released all of 11 months after the launch of Wii; please tell me, what did you struggle with?

4	Super Mario Sunshine is a Mario 3D action game for the GameCube that was released in Europe in October 2002.

We unveiled Super Mario Galaxy for the first time last year at the E3 event⁵ held in the US, where Miyamoto-san announced that it would be released within 6 months after Wii's launch. At the time, I thought that we’d hopefully make it somehow.

5	E3 is a game show held annually in Los Angeles. Super Mario Galaxy was first announced here in May, 2006.

But, that turned out not to be the case.

Correct. I truly apologise to our customers who have been waiting for this game to come out for so long. But with this being the first 3D action Mario game in a while, we had very strong feelings about this game, and we felt that we couldn’t have our fans play it until we had managed to deal with any elements that we were not fully satisfied with. So although it was important to try and release this simultaneously with Wii's launch, we also felt that it was much more important to make a game that the customers would feel was really worth buying. We were so determined that we even thought of closing down the Tokyo office if Super Mario Galaxy received poor reviews.

And so you invited members of the public to take part in an impressive number of play tests. Why did you decide to have so many?

The idea to keep running it through such play tests came from our experience making Jungle Beat. This game was on the show floor during the Nintendo World⁶ that was held in 2004, where we carefully observed the visitors playing it and used what we learned then to make some final adjustments to the game. It was a valuable experience for me as a developer to learn the kinds of things you have to pay attention to in certain situations, so for Super Mario Galaxy, I wanted to make the best use possible of this kind of input.

6	Nintendo World was a hands-on event held by Nintendo in November 2004 in five locations throughout Japan.

Do you think 3D action games require more of this kind of play testing than other game types?

Actually, there was a time when I thought it might be impossible to make any 3D action game so accessible that anybody could easily pick it up and enjoy the experience. Many people end up losing track of where they are when playing in a 3D field, and there are also a lot of people who get motion sickness if the camera moves automatically. So, during the development of Super Mario Sunshine, we prepared several different camera modes that the players can choose from. However, this burdened the players with an additional task; they had to decide on the camera angle before they could go into game play.

Do you regret the decision?

I do. So for our next game, Jungle Beat, we followed up with a side-scrolling action game where we made the camera automatic, so that the player could play the game without worrying about the camera angle at all. But I think that by doing that, we just ignored the underlying problem with camera angles in 3D action games and did not do anything to solve the problem.

Then in Jungle Beat, you were able to make some surface changes, but that didn't deal with the root problem. Super Mario 64⁷, which Koizumi-san also worked on, was a game which received very favourable reviews but at the same time created a group of players that felt that it was hard for them to play 3D games. So the problem that was created then was left to be dealt with later?

7	Super Mario 64 was the first 3D Mario action game, which was released simultaneously with the Nintendo 64 console in March 1997 in Europe.

It was like we were ignoring the real problem. So for Super Mario Galaxy, I wanted to take on this difficult problem that was present within 3D action games upfront. This is part of why I felt it was necessary to listen to as many of the public play testers' opinions as possible.

So we had quite a few members of the public play test Super Mario Galaxy, and in a sense, I feel like I was one of those play testers myself. Of course, we also had Miyamoto-san sample it quite a bit. But there is one major difference between Miyamoto-san and myself, and that is the fact that I'm the type that gets motion sickness from 3D games.

A game producer who gets motion sickness! (laughs)

Every time a sample was ready to go, I would take it to Shimizu-san so that he could try it out. When he said "This is no good, I'm getting dizzy", I’d say "OK, I'll fix it right away" and get on it.

So he was just like a human motion sickness sensor! (laughs)

Yes, so I stuck to my role as the sensor. So for example, if Miyamoto-san came along and said "You need to make the camera angles more extravagant or it’ll lose impact", I replied with something like "But if we do that, I’ll get motion sickness". However, the problem is that he rarely listens to what I say. Of course, when the public testers say "I get motion sickness here", then he'll say, "OK, let's fix it"! (laughs)

Miyamoto-san must think the customers' opinions are of the utmost importance, even more than those of his fellow employees.

However, since everybody's different, our solution is ultimately just a camera that makes it harder to get motion sickness. We can't say that people will never get motion sickness from it.

I see. But still, for this game you had members of the public play a game that was still in development, and did your best to follow up on their reactions and implement that into the game.

Aside from people who get motion sickness, with 3D action games, there are quite a few people who get lost within the playing field, because they can't figure out which way to go next. And there are also a good number of people who feel like 3D games aren't made for them. In releasing this 3D Mario game, what did you do to try to cater to these people?

When I first saw the Wii Remote, I thought it was a great opportunity for a new challenge. I wanted to limit the number of buttons you used in this game to two. Typically, Mario's basic action is the A Button jump. However, on a spherical map, it's pretty difficult to try to jump and stomp on an enemy.

Koizumi-san even went as far as saying "Making the characters jump in a 3D action game is absurd.".

So we made a new move for Mario, the spin. With this move, you're able to tell the distance from the target even when the camera is looking straight down from above, making it easy to defeat enemies. You can knock out an enemy by spinning, and from there you can take your time to jump and stomp your enemy. During the early stages of development, the spin was activated by rotating the Control Stick on the Nunchuk. But during the development process, it was decided that a tilt sensor was to be included in the Wii Remote. So we changed the spin so that it could be activated by a slight shake of the Remote. This way, the gameplay has become more intuitive, even for those people who usually don't play video games.

In a 3D action game, the most basic action you do is running. While you are running, the easiest way to attack is not by jumping, but by spinning. So in Super Mario Galaxy, running and spinning are the basic actions.

So it's not a game about jumping?

Not all stages are spherically shaped, and there are definitely stages where you can enjoy jumping action. If there weren't, it wouldn't be a Mario game! (laughs)

Originally, you were able to spin as much as you wanted. If you kept shaking the Wii Remote, you were able to defeat as many enemies as you liked. But then Miyamoto-san said, "Let's change it so once you spin, you won't be able to spin again for a little while. That way, you'll learn to time shaking the Wii Remote, and while you can't spin, you'll have to deal with enemy attacks. It would be a lot more fun", and it became the way it is today. But from there, fixing the balance of the enemies and the bosses was no picnic! (laughs)

But thanks to the advice from Miyamoto-san, I think we were able to tighten everything together nicely.

In Super Mario Galaxy, one of the key actions involves Mario being chased around by Bullet Bills, which must be guided towards objects to destroy them. This can be easily done by simply moving the Control Stick on the Nunchuk. But if you make it so that it requires you to press the jump button at the same time, it gets a little difficult. Even for things like this, we made it thinking about our customers who will be playing for the first time.

This can be said for all the Mario games, but the games' fun factor is actually similar to the experience you get playing sports! (laughs) When you're first given a task and someone tells you "OK, try this action!", it's really difficult to be able to do it on the first try. And when you fail, you can almost hear a voice from above saying "Come on! One more time!". (laughs) You keep pushing yourself in this way over and over again, and when you finally clear it, the sense of achievement is like no other. But lately, I think the number of people who just give up right away has increased dramatically. They just say, "I can't do this". On top of that, there are an increasing number of people who think that 3D action games aren't for them, without even giving them a chance. What has been done to appeal to this audience?

I think our response to that problem was the inclusion of the two player mode, where two people can play cooperatively.

The Co-Star mode. Actually, the cooperative mode in a video game is something that I feel particularly strong about. Miyamoto-san was the one who made the original Mario Brothers⁸ game, so it seems like every time he worked on a new Mario game, he was thinking of new and fun ways to implement a simultaneous two player mode. But it just hasn't worked too well. That's what he had told me while I was working at HAL Laboratories⁹. It was about the time that I was working on Kirby’s Fun Pak¹⁰ for the SNES. Back then, he told me "Kirby games move at a slower pace than Mario games, so I think they’re suited for two player co-operative gameplay". When I heard that, (Masahiro) Sakurai-kun¹¹ and I wondered, "why does Miyamoto-san raise topics that he can't work out himself?" (laughs) Thinking about all the struggles we went through back then, making this game must have been quite a challenge.

8	Mario Bros. is an NES game that was released in Europe in September 1986.
9	HAL Laboratories is the software company that worked on such games as Kirby’s Fun Pak, and Smash Bros.
10	Kirby’s Fun Pak was released on the SNES in Europe in January 1997. This game had a two-player cooperative mode – a first for the series
11	Masahiro Sakurai is the director of games such as the Kirby series and the Smash Bros. series. He has since left HAL Laboratories, and is currently working on Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii.

That's correct. It was a lot harder than I was expecting. In Co-Star mode, if you're the experienced player, you're able to stop rolling boulders and enemies with the pointer to help the inexperienced player, or the inexperienced player can take on the assisting role and enjoy themselves simply by collecting Star Bits. You can also use the on-screen pointer to indicate which way the main player should go, and have fun talking to each other while playing.

At first, I was thinking about designing it so that both players would take on similar roles. But it became hard to decide on how that should be executed. But Miyamoto-san sorted things out for us, and it became a feature that worked great for novice gamers. I heard one of the staff members who isn’t very good at action games talking about how much fun it was playing with the Co-Star mode.

What kind of things did Miyamoto-san sort out?

He said "Let's make it so that you're able to do things in the two-player mode that you're not able to in single player". He also said it's best to draw a clear line between the single and two-player modes. Until then, you were able to stop boulders using the pointer in single player mode as well. But once we changed it so that it could only be done in two-player mode, the game worked great; it really balanced things out.

If you were still able to stop boulders in the single player mode, I think it would have ended up being a completely different game. But before you made the decision to clearly differentiate these two modes, things really must not have been organized.

It wasn't good at all. However, just by Miyamoto-san saying "let's draw a line", everything started coming together.

Miyamoto-san often talks about how an idea is something that resolves several problems at once, and it seemed like that one idea did just that. (laughs)

As the two of you worked with Miyamoto-san on Super Mario Galaxy, I'm sure there must have been times when he did things that made you go "He got me!" How did these things occur?

Well, there were a lot of times when the things he did made me feel that he had got me, but this time I was actually the one who upended the tea table¹². But after I did that, Miyamoto-san came up and said to me "Why did you upend it? It was better the way it was", and realigned the plates back on the table.

12

This is a reference to the classic Japanese comic and animated series, Hoshi of the Giants. The father in the series once upended the tea table when the family was eating their meal there. Shigeru Miyamoto's working style has been compared to this because of his tendency to make last-minute suggestions that leave everyone else scrambling to implement them before the deadline.

Shigeru Miyamoto clears up the tea table.

(laughs)

You often hear of Miyamoto-san helping others to clear up the tea table after he has upended it.

For this game, I tried getting as many plates ready as I could, so I could just throw away those that I didn't need. But Miyamoto-san would see those plates, and would reorganise them, saying "that idea was really good, let's use it here". So it felt like he was clearing the tea table for us. That's actually the reason I used the cook as a metaphor earlier in this interview! (laughs)

There are so many cooks who try to order new ingredients when something goes wrong while they're making a game. But with Miyamoto-san, he tries to combine two ingredients that don’t work on their own to make a dish that works. He really doesn't put any of the ingredients to waste.

Him doing so was really helpful.

It makes the person who made the dish in the first place feel a lot better, too.

By the way, Iwata-san, ever since the DS and Wii were released, you keep mentioning how to make games that can be enjoyed by anyone, from age 5 to 95. Hearing that, we really put in the extra effort to make Super Mario Galaxy a game that could be enjoyed by anyone as well, from age 5 to 95.

So in order to make the game so that anyone can play it, we made the game very easy to clear during the early stages of development. However, when Miyamoto-san tried that version out, he said that it was too easy, and lacked intensity.

I often hear him say how a game must not lose excitement for the sake of making it easy, and that a game needs to be easy, yet be intense at the same time. This actually leads to what we talked about earlier, about how we put a limit on how often you could spin.

Since we're talking about the intensity of the game, I placed a rather bold suggestion for this game. I wanted to change the life meter’s maximum to 3. With this, Mario ends up losing more lives as a result, but at the same time we increased the number of 1-Up mushrooms that are available throughout the game, and created checkpoints. In Mario 64, the life meter’s maximum was 8. That meant it was rare to lose a life. The life meter’s maximum was also 8 in Super Mario Sunshine, but I felt that the life parameter didn't really tie in to the intensity factor. Even when you find a 1-Up mushroom, you don't think much of it. So this time, we changed the life meter’s maximum to 3, and it became a lot easier to lose a life, but you could get more 1-Up mushrooms to compensate.

The fact that the intensity factor changes according to whether the life meter is set to 3 or 8 is representative of the things that players do not notice that actually change the gameplay dramatically.

Thinking about all of these elements, with the addition of Iwata-san’s "from age 5 to 95", I really struggled as to how I could bring that intensity into the game.

During the development process, my message "from age 5 to 95" must have been a challenge for everyone among the staff. Though many games were created because of this slogan, at the same time I understand that this was a difficult challenge in the development of Super Mario Galaxy. But the Co-Star feature was born as a result of this struggle, and in that sense, I feel a firm conviction that the game will help greatly expand the range of the gaming audience. And now to wrap things up, if I could get both of you each to say a few words to our readers about the game.

Fundamentally, I think a Mario game is the type of game that's really not about completing the game, but rather about having fun just playing. So, I made sure there were lots of areas in the game that could be enjoyed, even by little children, just by moving Mario around. In these places, you don't have to think about what you have to accomplish, so you can play around freely. I hope people who will play this game will find a special place of their own in the game, and discover their own way of enjoying the game.

I think it's about having everybody gather around the TV. A Mario game is not necessarily something you play on your own. In Super Mario Galaxy, you're able to create up to SMG 6 save files. So for example, I think it would be fun if you looked at the save file that Dad made, and noticed that he had already collected 10 Power Stars. You're also able to check what time a person has been playing last in the file selection screen, so I think that somewhere in the world, a child may go up to their dad, and say "Dad, you've been playing in the middle of the night!" (laughs)

22 years ago, when the first Super Mario was released, there used to be many more people who would gather around the TV. The Famicom (NES) console would be connected to the TV in the living room, and a crowd of friends and family would gather around the player. The crowd would also enjoy the game play experience, and eventually the spectator would be trying to grab the controller away from the player, saying "It's my turn!". In truth, well-made games share a common quality where it's fun just watching the person play. Since Wii is connected to the living room TV, I would love to see someone having fun watching the person play, where they would then jump in the game using Co-Star mode, and the next thing you know, someone who does not usually play games would find themselves playing Super Mario Galaxy.

Right, we made the game hoping something like that would happen, so I would like for as many people as possible to have fun with the game.

Thank you very much. Next time, I would like to talk to the younger developers in the Tokyo office.