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Miyamoto - SM3DW is a mix of Galaxy/NSMB, may return to Galaxy series, a single-player focus likely later

by rawmeatcowboy
05 July 2013
GN Version 4.0
A portion of a GameInformer interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...

GI: Can we touch on Mario briefly? Super Mario 3D World is a successor to 3D Land. What was it about 3D Land that was a good model for Wii U now?

SM: I think there may an impression that Mario 3D Land did well, so that's why we decided to bring that to Wii U. But, in fact, what we really try to do is look at, "What is the easiest way for people to play the Mario games?" And certainly we have the new Super Mario Bros. series, which is the new sidescrolling games, and those are particularly easy to play for people who are more novice gamers. You've got four-player multiplayer. And then we have games like the Galaxy series.

What we tried to do with Super Mario 3D Land, was try to create a Mario game that was set in a 3D world that fell somewhere between the openness of the Galaxy games and the sidescrolling of the new Super Mario Bros. games to create a 3D Mario game that a wider array of people could play. And we felt that, with Super Mario 3D Land, we managed to achieve that. So, what we wanted to do was extend that broader appealing 3D Mario game to Wii U in a way that allow more people to experience it. That's what we chose for Super Mario 3D World this time. But we still have, obviously, the Galaxy series, and there's a possibility that in the future we may look to explore what else we can do with the Galaxy series. For us, it was really about trying to find the right 3D Mario space in which we're going to allow the widest audience to play.

GI: The New Super Mario Bros. series emphasizes multiplayer and the new Mario 3D World on Wii U emphasizes multiplayer. Do you see multiplayer being a core part of the Mario franchise moving forward, or would you still consider doing a Mario game that was single-player only?

SM: Before there was the Super Mario Bros. series, there was just the Mario Bros. game, and that was a 2-player multiplayer game. So, even from those very early days, we always wanted to include some type of multiplayer. When the new Super Mario Bros. team on Wii was able to do that and include the four-player multiplayer in the side-scrolling fashion, we very quickly found that our team really liked that, and they immediately said, "Well, we want to do the same thing in a 3D Mario space." They've had a lot of fun exploring that. But definitely with the single-player Mario experience, there's still a lot of possibilities that we can explore, so I think we'll probably go back to that again at some point.

Full interview here