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Producer on Nintendo's CD-i games on working with Nintendo, reception, sales success & more

by rawmeatcowboy
28 August 2016
GN Version 5.0

Coming from a Game Informer interview with Stephen Radosh, executive producer on Hotel Mario...

On Nintendo approval

“They could have kept saying no, and then it would have never hit the market. I was expecting nothing but combative, and I got the exact opposite. I still had to get approval from Nintendo on everything, because these were their trademark characters. And anyone who owns trademark characters will tell you, you don’t want Link having sex with Zelda on the ramparts of the castle.”

On Miyamoto seeing the games

“I’m pretty sure he would have – everything was still under their control ultimately. The meetings were short, amicable, fun, lots of laughs.”

On the three Zelda games

“We went through a little bit of issues with the look of characters for Link and Zelda. Because animation at that time was really expensive here, we opted for this hand-drawn look for those games. We would up with Russian animators. We’d send them vague storyboards and gameplay, and then [Russia] would say, ‘What do you think of this for a visual concept?’ We would go back and forth, and one or two of the original concepts were negated by Nintendo.”

On the cancelled second Mario game

“It never even got to the point of real playability, because when they decided to pull the [CD-i], they also killed all development. We had a couple of direct ports of other games from other systems where it was just a matter of translating the code, and they were going to keep those going so there were at least a couple of products in the pipeline for the last year of its existence. But, it was at that point where I sat at my desk for about a month and it was like, ‘No, I can’t do this.'

I brought a little bit of my television to game design at Philips in that, if you’re hired as a writer, you’re handed a [knowledge] bible. This is this character, this is where she was born, this is what she likes, this is what she doesn’t like, this is what she does for amusement – that kind of thing. We created a lot of that for the Link and Zeldas, and even a little bit for Mario. By giving all the dos and don’ts – some of which were supplied by Nintendo, by the way – we never hit a dead end. We never asked a character to do something that a character couldn’t do or shouldn’t do, so the game would progress very smoothly. We had really nice development curves on those games.”

On reviews of the games and sales

“The internet was around, there were bulletin boards – we got really positive responses. The games sold really well, especially Hotel Mario. Hotel Mario sold for years after the company went out of business. I’m assuming [Nintendo Japan] saw it. They continued to be non-problematic, which to me was the indication that they really did like them. Because if they didn’t like them, they had every opportunity to throw up as many roadblocks along the way as they wanted to.”

[Link]