Extra quotes from the Nintendo video (Patreon)

As you can imagine, I did a lot of research for my most recent video, on Nintendo's game design.

I had some thoughts and ideas going in (the whole thing started with an idle thought about how it's weird that Samus opens doors by shooting them in Metroid!) but needed quotes and confirmation from Nintendo.

And, yowch, I found it. I ended up with more quotes and killer info than I could fit into a single video.

So for Nintendo fans and designers who want to go further, here's a complete list of all the cool stuff I discovered on my journey. Sources for all the quotes in the actual video can be found in the YouTube description.

I'm going to make this article public next week because it's an important companion piece, but Patrons get it first this weekend.

Form follows function

Iwata Asks - Mario Bros 

The introduction of the turtle. Funny that Super Mario Bros would retroactively break this design! The turtles are spinies in Mario Advance but remain unchanged in NES Remix.

Shigeru Miyamoto: That’s when we thought about what kind of creature could withstand being struck from below and would eventually recover. We racked our brains thinking what we could use…

Satoru Iwata: And that’s how you came up with the turtle! (laughs)

Miyamoto: The turtle was the only solution! (laughs) Strike it from below and it flips over! Leave it for a while and it rights itself!

Iwata Asks - Super Mario Bros 

Miyamoto even thought hard about what Mario should collect in Super Mario Bros.

Iwata: But why coins in the first place?

Miyamoto: We could have used fruit or something, but I thought that if fruit came out in a place where there are turtles and crabs, the players would think they were in danger and run away. When I tried to think of something that anyone would definitely want if they saw it, I knew that money was just the thing!

Shmuplations - Gunpei Yokoi 

I wonder if Yokoi picked this up from Miyamoto, or the other way around?

Gunpei Yokoi: When I make characters I try to design them in a way that teaches players how to play the game. In other words, if an enemy looks too pretty, they won’t seem like an enemy to the player.

But if you give them an enemy-like appearance, then the player won’t need to read the manual or anything to know 'oh, I’ve got to avoid this guy.'

Iwata Asks - Cat Mario in Super Mario 3D World 

This is bonkers.

Kenta Motokura: This time, we prioritised that great feeling you get when you run and jump. In that process we came up with two separate ideas – running on all fours, and climbing up a wall. Both were actions that Mario usually doesn’t have, and those ideas triggered our decision.

Iwata: So you took two ideas that were originally separate and combined them into one. And you thought a cat would fit that perfectly?

Motokura: That’s right.

Iwata: Oh… That’s putting function first! Right, I’d forgotten. You’re that kind of team. The outward form of a cat came later, after the function had been set.

Yoshiaki Koizumi: I had them show it to me before we had settled on a cat. In the testing phase, the characters were simply running around on all fours with their regular appearance. I became really worried when I saw that. I couldn’t look at Princess Peach! (laughs)

Iwata: She was crawling around in her normal dress?

Miyamoto: She was moving so quickly!

Koizumi: It was like a scene from a horror movie. But when we decided on a cat, various pieces snapped into place.

Iwata Asks - Super Mario Galaxy 

I'm bummed that I couldn't quite squeeze in the quote “There's a side to the enemy characters where they exist just to be defeated by Mario”. I love that.

Motokura: I originally had this image inside my head of a character that I thought was “Mario”. However, when I tried to draw Mario according to what I had in mind, it just didn't look right. I tried to combine characters that showed up in the previous games of the series but they didn’t look right, either.

So I decided to start by learning the character's functions, closely paying attention to the new character concepts. It became much easier to draw when I tried it from that direction. Also, it may seem strange for me to say this as the person designing them, but there's a side to the enemy characters where they exist just to be defeated by Mario.

Gameplay first

Time / Techland 

Miyamoto: Whenever I start working on something I always start with creating new gameplay. After that gameplay becomes more concrete, we look at which character is best suited to the gameplay.

Gamecubicle 

Miyamoto: Whenever we create a new Mario game, even though it's a sequel in a series, we always try to offer some new challenge.

Shmuplations - Shigeru Miyamoto 

Miyamoto: If I may speak from experience, when making a game, if you don’t change the gameplay system, there isn’t much point in making a new game. So, taking Mario as an example, if you keep the same system but just change the maps, its not going to be very good.

For our development teams, for the beginning of the first year its usually comprised of 3 to 4 people, then about half a year in we start adding people until about the 8 month mark, where we reach a team of 20 or so. A new game system determines about 60% of the game creation process. In my case I work on that nucleus of the game first. The maps, story, etc are all about 10 or 20%.

Iwata Asks - Kirby's Epic Yarn 

Iwata: Kirby's Epic Yarn wasn't originally intended to be a Kirby game. You really did start from scratch and for a while were making a completely new title called Fluff's Epic Yarn

Nintendo Everything - Metroid Prime 

Senior producer Brian Walker and senior designer Mike Wikan talk about Nintendo's influence on Metroid Prime. A Patron pointed out that Wikan worked on DOOM 2016 for a spell so perhaps there's a link there…

Brian Walker: Mike Wikan likes to tell a story about Mr. Miyamoto asking us during the early design phases of Prime 1, 'What would it be like if Samus had a bug’s head?'

Mike Wikan: And at the time, I remember going back to our office and saying, ‘Switching heads? What does that have to do with Metroid?

Walker: He wasn’t asking if she had the head of a fly…

Wikan: He was talking about the mechanic of altered perception as a whole.

Walker: And from that, the visor system came to be, where Samus could see different things with different visors and use that as a puzzle-solving element.

Nintendo Everything - Metroid Prime 

Mark Pacini: Originally when we were talking about what Samus would be able to do in the game world, we had visors in the game, but we didn't really expand too much on them.

Nintendo's thing was like, 'this is going to be about the scan visor. This game is about scanning the environment', and we're like, 'Okay, but this is like an action game, this is like a shooting game'.

But it was Tanabe-san who had an idea of like, 'well what if we did this, and you get information, this is how we do the tutorials, and this is how you give the players instruction, and we could do all these things with the scan visor'. Their motivation was, ‘this is a game about the scan visor’, and our’s was not at all, but we did the due diligence to integrate it in a way that felt natural to the game and how would we want to do this?

Gamasutra - Pokemon 

Pokemon is made by Game Freak so their philosophy is a little different (and perhaps why Pokemon doesn't have radical changes from game to game). But the first game was certainly created around a strong system.

Also, check out Game Freak's Drill Dozer - it's a GBA game that harmonises around a central mechanic in a totally Nintendo way. I wanted to include it in the video but it would have distracted.

Junichi Masuda: Trading is really the core concept behind the Pokémon games; it's really the core idea that birthed the Pokémon games, and everything really exists to facilitate trading.

For example, the Pokémon creatures we create, we give them value for players that makes players want to trade them, by giving them moves or setting their statistics, the parameters, and making them attractive, something that people would want to trade their Pokémon for.

Also, stuff like the Pokédex was created as a collection element to support that trading aspect.

And from there, trading is a lot more fun when you do it with people, so that's how the communication aspect came into play. So you're not just trading within the game world, but also outside of the game world, communicating with other people and trading with them.

Story comes later

Nintendo - Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons 

Capcom game director Yoshiki Okamoto talks about the Oracle games.

Yoshiki Okamoto: Mr. Miyamoto normally creates the game scenario (story and characters) after the initial game play is designed. If the action part of the game is solid, the scenario can be developed from there. We started by using the Capcom scenario creation company, Flag Ship, to create the scenario first. Then, we created maps and started developing the game. I don't believe that worked.

Miyamoto: That didn't work? [laughs]

Okamoto: Using that system, the team had to redo both the scenario and the maps several times to make all the elements fit.

Nintendo World Report - Animal Crossing 

A piece with Katsuya Eguchi, the producer of Animal Crossing. That game started life as an RPG where players would work together, but at different times, on the same save game.

Iwata: I think that’s the secret game making for Miyamoto-san and co. At the beginning there’s no characters or world. Of course there’s no story either. I get to see a lot of design docs written by various people, but when you get those that have these passionate ideas for characters or worlds without touching on the game systems at all, I tend to feel that 'as this currently stands, since this important thing hasn’t been decided yet I bet they’ll start running into problems after development begins'.

Katsuya Eguchi: Ya… Even if you begin with creating the world, in the end you’re perplexed trying to figure out how to end things.

Other bits

Iwata Asks - New Super Mario Bros Wii 

This quote got dropped from the final script. A Patron rightly pointed out that it was weird to jump back to the flagpole comment.

Hiroyuki Kimura: The higher you grab onto the pole, the more points you get. That's a logical way to do it with a jumping game, so we couldn't think of any better method. So when we made the Wii version, we were confident in leaving the flagpole as it is.

Dromble - Controllers 

Something I never really knew, but found out during my research, is that Shigeru Miyamoto is instrumental in designing the controllers for Nintendo consoles.

It reminds me of Apple, who get incredible results by developing both the software and the hardware for their gizmos.

Miyamoto: I wanted to focus on the immediate recognition of the main button on the joypad. In SNES it was the A button, in the GameCube, it is the green one. It is pleasant to the touch and the player is immediately aware what button is the most important one, the main control between him and what permits him to interact, for example, with Mario.

Iwata Asks - Super Mario Galaxy 

Just a smart bit of design from Miyamoto here.

Takao Shimizu: 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.

Twitter - John Ricardi 

Game translator John Ricardi stumbled upon this interview from Nintendo that would have been very handy a couple weeks ago!

John Ricardi: Metroid came to be from wanting to make a game that used what became the screw attack.

They wanted to find a different way to attack enemies from the traditional Mario jump style, so they came up with spinning through foes

Ah interesting - wasn't purely about jumping; they wanted to make something where you weren't encouraged to avoid enemy contact