Koizumi says Switch success is half-expected and half-surprising, talks Mario development and Zelda dev differences
This month’s issue of EDGE has a cover dedicated to Super Mario Odyssey. There really isn’t a whole lot new about the game itself, but the magazine does have a few choice words from Nintendo EPD’s general producer Yoshiaki Koizumi.
One of the topics Koizumi commented on was Switch’s success. Regarding the console’s performance thus far, Koizumi said:
“It’s half expected and half surprising. I always feel a certain amount of confidence in my work, and I imagine a lot of different scenarios. The one that’s come to fruition was one of the better ones I was imagining! We wanted people to have more time to play games.”
Koizumi later talked about how Mario games are conceived:
“Mario games begin development not with just one idea, but many. You’ll have some ideas from previous projects that you weren’t able to incorporate into the final product, and maybe a few new ideas. Once you put them all together you start to see a little bit of a vision about how the game’s going to look and play as a whole.
Once you have enough of those, you can start to prototype each of those, play them, and see which ones naturally fall out because they don’t fit, or aren’t as much fun. Before long, you have a game concept that is starting to define itself.”
Koizumi ended his chat with EDGE by talking about the design differences between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. He said on this front:
“In Breath of the Wild, there’s a very wide open space. There’s a lot of emphasis on seeing a faraway location, and thinking about how you might get there. But in Super Mario Odyssey, the space is more compact. The goals, and the kinds of actions you use, are more about the things that are right in front of you, and how they will interact.”
