Miyamoto on creating new styles of 2D Mario art, interest in having classic games on Switch

Back at E3, Game Informer interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto. The site only published a portion of its discussion at the time, but to celebrate Super Mario Odyssey, has now shared the rest of the comments. Game Informer spoke with Miyamoto about a few different things, including the approach to 2D Mario art going forward and interest in having classic games on Switch.

You can read Miyamoto’s responses about these topics below. For the full interview, head on over here.

On whether we’ll see a 2D game made of Yoichi Kotabe’s classic Mario art…

We’re at almost like a turning point. When you look at Mickey Mouse there is the classic Mickey Mouse, and then there is the modern Mickey Mouse and the classic one has a lot of flavor to it and the modern Mickey Mouse looks really great, but it is losing a little bit of the flavor, and that’s something we discuss to make sure we keep that intact as we’re creating characters. And of course the development team for any Mario game may want to use Kotabe’s art, but there is also a character-development team that’s really working hard to create new styles and new work. Once they get more work done, I think more and more of that will be reflected into games.

We did a collaboration recently with Uniqlo where it was a contest for people to send in drawings, and like that we want to continue create and evolve new art styles.

… I do believe that Mr Kotabe’s art has become kind of a standard within Nintendo, but we definitely want to continue to see if we can evolve that as time goes by.

On whether Miyamoto would like to see it move in the same way that a game like Rayman Legends in that beautiful 2D art style…

I think there’s many different ways we could do it. But at the same time, if you ask some elementary school kids, a lot of them don’t recognize or don’t know the Mario from Mr. Kotabe. All they’ve seen is stuff from 3D Mario or 3D Mario World. So, I think our challenge is going to be trying to bring awareness to that side of Mario moving forward.

On the possibility of remaking Mario 64…

We have a version of Mario 64 on the DS, and as you mentioned there are Zelda ports on the 3DS, but rather than focus on trying to remake them, I would rather if we were to think about porting them, focus on more recent titles, but using the unique gameplay elements of the Switch. When you think about the playstyle of the Switch it would be great if I could play all classic games on it.