did you know that Nintendo made a special Rumble enabled version of Mario Kart 64 but never released it or that Super Smash Brothers massah hilu Sakurai briefly considered making a Kirby fighting game instead of Smash for the last few years we've been combing through hundreds of foreign magazines looking for interesting tidbits to translate into English and that's where most of this video's information comes from our latest haul of Japanese mags was full of interviews for Nintendo 64 games and practically all of them had information that never reached the West so unless you lived in Japan
in the late '90s or early 2000s you probably haven't heard much of the stuff in this video either today we'll focus on facts from games like Mario Kart 64 Majora's Mask and the OG Super Smash BRS so let's kick things into gear with a few tidbits all about Mario Kart 64's scrapped ideas we're going to start things off with a quick look at a shagar mamoto interview from a 1996 issue of fam Maga 64 the interview took place at Nintendo's space world event that same year where Nintendo showed off tons of games like Zelda 64
Earthbound 64 Star Fox 64 as well as the game we're talking about first Mario Kart 64 the version of the game shown at space World featured a new character to the subs series Donkey Kong DK's inclusion didn't expand the game's roster however he simply replaced a character from an earlier build of the game kamak we saw him in an issue of Nintendo power and in a bit of footage but the reason for kamak removal has always been a bit of a mystery to the way West in this issue of fam Maga 64 however the interviewer
got an answer directly from mamoto on why kamak lost out to DK according to mamoto we had kamak in but he looked off and too ordinary so we changed it we want to use highly distinctive characters so mystery solved it seems DK's distinctive size and fur covered physique is what secured his inclusion in Mario Kart let's move on to an interview from December 2003's issue of Nintendo dream magazine that sounds familiar it's because we covered this issue in our GameCube games video from a few weeks back the interview does focus on Double Dash but the
devs had a couple of Mario Kart 64 tidbits we set aside for this video halfway into the interview the devs start talking smack about the chain chomp item saying it's annoying but only when someone else has it whichever Dev holds the leash will sing its Praises all the banter seems to jog Double Dash director Kyoshi mizuki's memory who reveals the team seriously considered having chain onp items in Mario Kart 64 Mizuki said we'd actually talked about including chain chomp since the N64 and so put him in this time as a test before we made the
adjustments everyone was very happy with him mk64 did have Chomps but they're only on Rainbow Road and they are stage hazards not items the devs don't say why Chomps weren't items on the N64 but seeing is how almost every 64 Dev Story is about tackling restrictions it seems technical limitations likely kept Chomps from leaving rainbow road so producer sugiyama was the visual director on Mario Kart 64 and according to him one of the goals for this GameCube sequel was to achieve everything they couldn't do on N64 64's characters were just 2D Sprites on a polygon
pivoting on a single point that made steep slopes and Falls look awkward which is partly why 64's courses favored flat designs but this also prevented the devs from implementing another feature that ended up in Double Dash later in the interview the interviewer mentions how great it is to replay footage using double Dash's new replay feature then sugiyama brings up some interesting mk64 history saying that was another thing we wanted to do on N64 but couldn't this was partly due to that awkwardness of 2D Sprites on slope terrain we mentioned but Takahashi says that the limited
angles the characters could be displayed in also played a role so basically the replay feature was held back until the team could make a fully 3D Mario Kart and avoid cumbersome visuals jumping to another edition of Nintendo dream back when it was called 64 dream their October 97 issue has an interesting blur up on Mario Kart 64 in response to a reader's question in July 97 Nintendo re-released a special edition of Super Mario 64 exclusively in Japan this was called the shindo PAC Taio version which notably made Mario 64 compatible with the N64 Rumble pack
and with this in mind one of 64 dreams readers was curious if Mario Kart 64 would get the same treatment Nintendo's head of PR Yoshi oh hongo gave a bit of a surprising response saying in house we've already created a version compatible with Rumble technically speaking making it compatible with vibration packs is a simple process but I don't know whether it will be reprinted or not Mario Kart 64 is by far the bestselling N64 software and it's unclear whether it would be a good idea to make it compatible with vibration packs we guess the rumble
enabled version of Mario Kart 64 we'll just have to live on in our dreams we've got more N64 facts coming up but first we've got a huge offer from today's sponsor rage Shadow Legends grab it yourself in just a moment we were kind of surprised to find out that hundreds of thousands of Rage Shadow Legends players actually play on PC so we tried it ourselves if raid being mobile only stopped you from giving it a try the PC version is easy to jump into we genuinely had a lot of fun building our team leveling up
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about a few interesting details from The Legend of Zelda Majoris Masque we had another issue of 64 dream translated from November 1999 where 64 dream interviewed shagara mamoto about the game's development giving some unique insights we've never heard before on the first page mamoto outlines his duties as producer like holding meetings at key points in development and providing support during production however he says he never gave specific Direction and would just give the team brief notes then mamoto reveals how dire the stakes were if the team couldn't finish Majora's Mask on time saying that he
told the team that he'd stop development if they couldn't release on time 64 dream pushes for clarification asking are you saying that you'll stop the release of Majora's Mask to which mamoto responds that's right for example if we got to November and were told it needed another year to complete at that point it would take so long it would get in the way of dolphin so nintend Nintendo needed the GameCube then known as project dolphin to have games for its launch window so badly that mamoto was willing to cancel Majora's Mask to ensure the cube
success this is followed by something else we've never heard before and couldn't find in any Wiki article or interview 64 dream asks mamoto if the team began thinking about Majora's Mask After okarina Time had released to which mamoto says no it was before it released it might have been after release that we specifically decided on the plot that we're now working on every other source we looked at claimed or at least implied that Nintendo began thinking about Majora after okarina release but that doesn't seem to be the case on some level the team were already
considering a shorter game that reused okarina assets other than Ura Zelda mamoto also brings up that the team wanted to make Majora accessible for all Gamers after their market research revealed that most players quit Oar of time after a round the fire temple or sooner in light of this they aimed to design Majora's Mask in a way that around 80% of players could beat the game from here 64 dream asks if Moto's wife reached the end in okarina uh to which he says no she's still in the Shadow Temple the conversation eventually switches Focus to
the game's masks and why the devs made them such a central feature according to mamoto with okarina of time when it came to how deep we could delve into all the different characters there were a lot of inadequacies we decided to make a plot entwined with masks to make the characters come more alive this time we hadn't used the mask gameplay system to its full extent anyway skull kid was a very profound character and The Mask salesman also had a suspicious vibe to him we wanted to tell a story that dug deeper on those subjects
mamoto later adds that Majora's 3day cycle was the team further exploring oken's night and day cycle mechanics later on the same page the interviewer expresses concern about Majora's passage of time and that the moon might fall while they're in the middle of solving a puzzle mamoto pretty much just says yep that'll happen and then laughs while past Zelda games Game Over when the player is out of Hearts mamoto explains that the devs plan to have an ending when time runs out and the moon Falls he goes on to say that if they can't find the
right balance at the end they might have to start development all over again a situation he said say is a producers biggest concern he ends the thought by saying well that's something we're testing now just how bad it would be right now it's bad in a pretty good way next up is the N64 classic Super Smash Brothers for this segment we translated 64 dreams February 99 issue which interviews two men who need no introduction Masahiro Sakurai and satoru AATA Sakurai kicks things off talking about how they chose the game's characters saying they purposely set aside
the question of which characters they'd use early on although the characters in world would ideally be decided at the planning stage they chose not to as they were concerned that if the characters lacked punch the game might be ignored upon release from here Sakurai goes into detail about how the project got started saying there were few games on N64 when we started the project there was a need to put out something impactful as soon as possible we started in September of 97 but actually even before then we were working on another action adventure game IAT
and I started with a test Version Rom and gave an official presentation to Nintendo and mamoto there we decided we'd go with an action adventure so I was writing the plot on my own for a while but it turned out that Zelda's development was also progressing into a 3D action adventure and it seems having two big titles in the same genre wouldn't be good for business 64 dream asks what happened to sakurai's project to which he explains I don't think we'll make that act Adventure game the Project's theme was past its expiration date and we
need to steadily cut things that aren't fresh we would have needed three or four years to complete it which would have been another bottleneck this prototype was briefly mentioned by Sakurai in one of his YouTube videos about creating games in that video he says it was an RC robot Adventure game where you hacked into security cameras to progress he also mentions that the game could take another 2 years to make but in the video he doesn't go into quite as much details so it's nice to have a bit more background on an unreleased Sakurai creation
the discussion shifts back to choosing characters and how iata and Sakurai considered many possibilities before deciding on Nintendo characters like working with famous manga writers to make them or designing them internally they also went back and forth on whether the game World should be comical or realistic and whether to have people or beasts Sakurai continued of course we make Kirby at Hal lab so we considered making it a Kirby fighting game too to succeed as a consumer fighting game it needs to already be recognized as an arcade game or be built on a recognizable IP
or it isn't likely to be accepted so we couldn't afford any half measures with the character selection Sakurai then explains the difficulties of maintaining the essence of each character Samos for example has a floaty jump and it might be better for a fighting game if she just moved more forcefully but they wanted to keep samus's unique actions while ensuring she could still move in a way that was consistent with other characters as to how Sakurai and a decided on who to include in their prototype Sakurai says they used the process of elimination like with Kirby
or Yoshi first of all they're not humanoid and they have special animations for copying or laying eggs so it would have been a high threshold to make them one of the characters you can choose at the very beginning then with Pikachu being so popular we expected to get the most instructions and directions on them so we decided to be cautious and put them off until later then with link since Legend of Zelda was in development we wanted to understand what his special moves were before making him IAT chimes in here reiterating that they judged which
characters had a chance of success and would not require reworking later after this 64 Dream came forth with a question many fans at the time were asking since Mario Luigi and even Donkey Kong are in the game why isn't Princess Peach it's a balance issue back of I said we also didn't want to lean too heavily into Mario we actually asked mamoto for his opinion that and we added in four hidden characters hidden characters are interesting appearing later on gives them superiority even to the point of absurdity we did talk about making it a Super
Mario fighting game at one stage in development so as well as a Kirby fighting game smash could have been a Mario fighter Hal was able to get characters from other companies like Pikachu and link to fight against each other 64 dream says this would be near impossible for other companies and asks how did HAL get the job done IAT thinks it could have something to do with Hal's location being between the developers in Tokyo who made Pokémon and mamoto and other devs in Kyoto and if you factor in that they made a name for themselves
with Kirby everything aligned for smash to happen the team didn't have any official resources when they were secretly developing the initial smash prototype so they had to get resourceful the Prototype featured Mario Donkey Kong Samus and fox and sarite had to make the models himself using photos as references Sakurai continued the first stages we got working were the Kirby stage and Metroid stage and we chose them because all we would need is to get the atmosphere of them right those two series hadn't released any polygon games so we had freedom in how we made them
having to fit so many characters from so many different creators in Smash seems like a challenge so 64 dream asked the duo if any issues popped up with other developers everything would be fun if it went the way we thought it would but things don't go that well in real life IAT said there are things here and there that make certain characters hard to make in polygons then Sakurai added that they'd have meetings with the devs and show them their progress but they didn't get as many requests to alter characters as they thought they would
aat says the developers were nice even though he and Sakurai thought they'd be the strictest critics but of course the devs knew better than most how tough it was for AATA and Sakurai to resolve the issue of why so many characters from different worlds could appear together the devs made it so they were toys fighting figures that appear to have come to life interestingly this idea actually came from Earthbound Creator shasat ET toy Sakurai said at the time we were planning to put it on display at a show and needed to hurry to come up
with the title and showed it to a toy he asked what we thought of having them be dolls it seems in a toy's head it must have been just like Toy Story with toys jumping out and fighting I also wanted to make use of the music and each character's motifs so I thought having them be dolls with a will of their own would prevent the distinctive characteristics of the characters from being contradicted did you also know that tons of Nintendo 64 games actually never existed but that there's a few no one really knew about for
more on that check out the video on screen thanks for watching and we'll see you next time
