By all accounts, Nintendo game design legend Shigeru Miyamoto is a mild-mannered and kind person. However, when I had the rare opportunity to interview two of the main characters in Nintendo 2D Mario’s new flagship game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I had to know: What feedback would Miyamoto – the man who created Mario and the lion’s share of my best childhood gaming memories – give to the Wonder development team?
Director Shiro Mori and producer Takashi Tezuka gave an honest and insightful answer about Miyamoto’s role in the process. “With Wonder in particular, it wasn’t like Mr. Miyamoto had been in our pocket this whole time whispering in our ear or anything like that,” said Tezuka.
“Sometimes he would come into our workplace and look at things and give some opinions. He would generally just watch things and make comments here and there, even things that didn’t seem like big comments—I’ve worked with Mr. Miyamoto for a long time and really understand him, so I was able to get what What he said was implying or meaning, and we were having conversations about those kind of topics.
“He had a comment about elephant Mario,” Mori-san interjected, referring to one of the new forms Mario could take on in Wonder.
“It was a phase where we still had tentative images of Elephant Mario, and we had plans to modify the visuals already, but he came and took a look before that and gave us the blunt comment that ‘This doesn’t look like Mario. In the same threads, there was an idea of how the elephant Mario could spray water, and he came and said that if the elephant was actually spraying water, it wouldn’t move that way, and that was an example of the comments he gave us.
Mario the Elephant has proven popular with fans
Although Miyamoto is not involved in day-to-day game development, he remains popular for his candid feedback and is known for his strong feelings about storytelling and other features. He made it clear a bit about some of his feelings in this regard in an interview with IGN earlier this year.
Despite Miyamoto’s feelings, Mario the Elephant proved to be a hit with fans. Among the visual gags, many enjoyed the scene of Mario the elephant crushing poor Yoshi. We also got to see a lot of power-ups during the 15-minute Nintendo Direct.
I played Super Mario Bros. Wonder for an hour last week, before my interview with Mori and Tezuka. Don’t miss my hands-on impressions, plus more from my conversation with the Wonder director and producer, including how the development team got started with over 1,000 ideas for Wonder effects.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and host of IGN’s two weekly Xbox shows, The podcast is openin addition to a monthly interview program (-ish), IGN is unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor’s pork,” not “pork roll.” Discuss it with him on Twitter at @DMC_ryan.
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