Miyamoto on Mario Run – Kingdom Builder inspiration, why it’s the right time for Mario on mobile, more
Posted on December 10, 2016 by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News
TIME has gone up with its own interview about Super Mario Run. Unsurprisingly, it was Shigeru Miyamoto answering the questions.
Miyamoto actually talked about quite a bit here. He spoke about how Nintendo decided on which gameplay elements to include, the different playable characters, the idea behind Kingdom Builder, and why it’s the right time for Mario to appear on mobile.
You can read up on a number of Miyamoto’s important responses below. Visit TIME here for the full discussion.
On bringing the mentality of using hardware in creative ways that complement gameplay to mobile…
One of the challenges in game development is the very first time you make a new game, you generally design it so that as broad of an audience as possible can play. But then gradually as you make more and more sequels, you start to make the game more complex and more challenging for the fans that have played the series. And you gradually get to a point where it becomes more difficult for beginners to be able to get into the game. So this has been sort of a focus of ours during the DS and the Wii days, where we’ve sort of tried to go back to the roots of the original gameplay and reset so that it has an easier entry point for people. And that was a very important thing for us with Super Mario Run as well.
We didn’t think about bringing an existing Mario gameplay to iPhone and just porting over something that you controlled with buttons before. We really focused on, what is the best Mario experience for what you get with iPhone?
Of course one of the advantages or one of the things about interactive entertainment that people like is the ability to completely control everything themselves. But even if you have some automatic support structures built in, it can still be fun for people to interact with what’s on the screen. And with Mario games in particular, it really is that sense of satisfaction that you get when Mario gets to the flagpole at the end.
But I also think that one of the most entertaining elements of interactive entertainment is that you as the player are able to look at what you’ve done and what’s coming ahead of you. And it’s really fun to think about, ‘Oh, I should have done this a different way,’ or, ‘This is coming and now I have to adjust to that.’ By playing these levels and replaying Super Mario Run, I think people will find a lot of fun just in slight changes to the timing of their taps in order to get all of the colored coins or maximize their score.
On how the gameplay elements were chosen/left out (only the mushroom power-up is in)…
I think with this being our first Super Mario game on iPhone, we’ve designed this both in what’s the best experience but also with a long road ahead of us in terms of what else we can do on iPhone. So perhaps you can look forward to some of that at some point in the future. But one thing we have done this time is that you’ll be able to play not just as Mario, but after going through the game and unlocking some things and meeting some conditions you’ll be able to play as some of the other characters as well.
On how Luigi/Yoshi/Toad will play in the game…
It’s less on having those characters to achieve or accomplish specific tasks, and more of giving players a tool to unlock more of their gameplay creativity. Even if you’re trying to collect the same group of colored coins, doing so with a different character will require you to do it in a different way. So that can be fun for the players to explore.
On balancing incorporating a variety of characters and level types…
Just because of the history of the franchise, we have a lot of assets to choose from. Actually for us, one of the biggest challenges was deciding what doesn’t go in because we were very quickly able to fill it up with content. Our approach was really to focus in on what are the right enemies for a game when Mario runs automatically. What are the right course styles? Those were the decisions that we were making, was zeroing in on those types of elements. But what that means is we still have a lot of ingredients left over that we can continue to cook with, so to speak.
A few things that we did, for example, is we took the Bullet Bill characters that usually come at you from the direction that you’re heading and we changed them and made them red, and now we have them coming at you from behind. The spiny characters with spikes on their shells are also little bigger so they’re easier to see.
On the inspiration behind Kingdom Builder mode…
There are a couple of reasons. One is there is actually a game in Japan that I’ve been playing on a smartphone with my wife, it’s called Neko Atsume, It’s sort of a cat collecting game. From that, I really got the sense of having this thing on your phone that you interact with on a regular basis, and then you grow and build it up from there, is a very compelling feature. And certainly Nintendo has had games that have done this in the past on our own platforms.
The other reason behind it, typically with the Super Mario games, what you’re really doing is you’re sort of strategizing and working your way through individual levels. And we wanted to have a method for you to save the accomplishments that you get in each of those levels and have a place where those accomplishments can kind of build up. And that’s where the idea for the Kingdom Mode came from.
On why it’s the right time for Mario on mobile…
A big factor is that over the past few years smartphones have just gotten more and more powerful to the point where the performance that we’re able to get out of the device is finally on par with what we expect from the gameplay performance and response for our games.
And then I think also there was a period, certainly for many years, our devices were the first sort of computing or interactive entertainment devices kids came into contact with. And that would be the first place where they experienced games. But now as more and more parents are giving hand-me-down phones to their kids, kids are often times coming into contact with games on smart devices at earlier and earlier ages. We wanted to be able to reach those kids on those devices so that they’ll be able to experience our games and those characters there, but then when they want to play a more in-depth experience they’ll gravitate towards our devices to do that.
And then also I think we’ve seen this with Pokémon Go, there are a lot of adults that, as they’ve gotten older, they’ve gravitated away from even purchasing gaming machines but they’re carrying a smartphone around with them. And all of a sudden, with Pokémon Go they’re reconnecting with Pokémon and playing Pokémon again. Our hope is with Super Mario Run that we’ll be able to reconnect with a lot of people that grew up playing Mario and that they’ll come back and want to play some more of our games on our platforms as well.
