This is Shigeru Miyamoto. If you’ve played video games any time in the past 30 years, you’re probably familiar with his work. Donkey Kong.
Zelda. Star Fox. And then, of course, this guy: It’s a me, Mario!
When Miyamoto makes games, he always tries to do things differently than other designers. Here he is — back in 1998 — explaining why he wasn’t focused on online gaming. And why he wasn’t adding small in-game purchases to Mario for iPhone in 2016.
Miyamoto has helped define a lot of what makes a game great. So how does he do it? In 1981, one of Miyamoto’s first assignments at Nintendo was to design a replacement for a game called Radar Scope.
It had performed poorly in the US,, leaving the company with 2,000 unsold arcade units. This is what he came up with: Miyamoto based the story on the love triangle in Popeye between a bad guy, a hero, and a damsel in distress. But since Nintendo couldn’t secure the rights to use those characters, Miyamoto replaced them with a gorilla, a carpenter, and his girlfriend.
In later games, that carpenter became a plumber. And his named changed, from Mr Video, to Jumpman, and then to Mario, after this guy, the landlord of a Nintendo warehouse near Seattle. This was one of the first times that a video game’s plot and characters were designed before the programming.
That change in approach came at a key time for video games. When Donkey Kong was first released in 1981, the video game market in North America was on the verge of collapse. It was saturated with a lot of different consoles, and the boom in home computers made a lot of people question why they’d want a separate device just to play games.
But the storytelling in games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda — which you could only play on Nintendo's own hardware — helped set them apart as best-sellers. A lot of Miyamoto’s genius can be seen in the first level of Super Mario Bros.
— probably the most iconic level in video game history. It’s designed to naturally teach you the game mechanics while you play. If you look at a breakdown, there’s a lot of really subtle design work going on here.
Though Mario is usually at the center of the screen, in this first scene he starts at the far left. All the empty space to the right of him gives you a sense of where to go. This character’s look and movement suggest it’s harmful.
But don’t worry. If you run into it, you’ll just start the game over without much of a penalty. Next, you see gold blocks with question marks.
These are made to look intriguing — and once you hit one, you’re rewarded. That then encourages you to hit the second block, which releases a mushroom. Even if you’re now scared of mushrooms, the positioning of the first obstacle makes it just about guaranteed that you're gonna run into this thing.
When you do, Mario gets bigger and stronger. And just like that, you’ve learned all the basic rules in the game without having to read a single word. Immersiveness in a video game has a lot to do with the controls — the more precisely you can move your character, the more you feel like you’re part of the story.
And Nintendo has always been a pioneer with controllers. It was the first to have the classic setup of the directional pad on the left and buttons on the right, the first to have left and right shoulder buttons, the first to have a 360-degree thumbstick, and the first to bring motion control to the mass market. But with 2016’s Super Mario Run, Nintendo, for the first time, made a game for a controller it didn’t design: the iPhone.
The Wii U flopped when it came out in 2012, and Nintendo 3DS sales are far below those of its predecessor. But the number of American gamers playing on mobile phones has doubled to more than 164 million between 2011 and 2015. You can think of Super Mario Run as a shift from immersiveness to accessibility.
And that’s kind of been Miyamoto’s design philosophy from the very start: make fun games that everybody can play. The rest is in our hands. "These controls direct the characters, the better your eye-hand coordination, the better you do.
