Mario: cos’è cosa

So to me, what’s really important about a Mario game is that it be simple to control and easy to understand. And that when you as the player is playing the game, the physics in the game are understandable to you, so that when you hold the controller, you play it in a way that you understand what you’re supposed to do, you understand the environment, and then you begin to unleash your own gameplay creativity. You try different things. The response that you get from the environment into what you attempted to do in the world feels natural to you, and ultimately the game itself becomes kind of a back and forth between us the developers in trying to expect what types of creative things you might try to do as a player and you the player in terms of the response that you’re expecting to get in the game. And to me, a Mario game is really unleashing the player’s creativity within the world that you’ve created.

As we showed you in the game, there’s this ice flower and the penguin suit and both of those shoot ice balls. And so, in developing the game, it’s easy to say, “Okay, we want the ice balls to freeze enemies.” But as soon as you make that decision, a number of different questions come up.

• If you freeze the enemy, what happens to it then?
• If the enemy is in the air, does the ice hang in the air or does it fall out of the air?
• If it falls out of the air, what happens when it hits the ground?
• Does it rest on the ground?
• How long should it take before it falls out of the air after you’ve frozen it?
• If it’s sitting in the air, can we jump on it?
• Should you be able to jump on it before it falls?
• When it falls from a certain height, should it just land or should it break?
• When you’re in the water and you freeze an enemy, as we showed in the demo today, the expectation is that, well you’ve just turned something into ice, doesn’t ice float?
• Shouldn’t ice float up?
• And then that brings the question, if the ice floats, how high does it float?
• Does it float all the way to the top?
• If it floats to the top, can Mario stand on it?
• If he can stand on it, can he slip?
• Can he slip when he’s on that ice or does he grip that ice?
• And what happens when he jumps off the ice?

It opens up a lot of different questions, and to me, what’s important about a Mario game is that the expectation that the user has in response to the action that they’ve done is something that we’re able to answer. We’re able to create the world in a way that it feels real, based on what the user would expect out of that type of world and that type of action.

In fede,
Shigeru Miyamoto