Newly-translated interview features Miyamoto talking Super Mario 64, unreleased Mario Paint 3D

Coming from the official Japanese strategy guide for Super Mario 64, featuring Shigeru Miyamoto...

Q: I don’t remember where I read it, but I believe you said once that the excitement one feels for a game doesn’t start when you pick up the controller, but earlier, when you’re walking home from school and thinking about how to get through the next part etc.

Miyamoto: Well, even if I didn’t say that, I imagine it’s true for everyone, right? Only in Mario 64, in terms of gameplay, we’ve intentionally returned to a much older feeling and style.

In the Mario games up to now, we’ve carefully crafted every stage and level down to the individual pixel. Take jumping, for example. Implementing jumping in 3D is really difficult.

In earlier Mario games, we were able to measure the number of pixels Mario could jump and know exactly what was possible. But this time, we had to design the levels so that as long as your jump was “close enough”, you’d make it; it was too hard for the player to judge. This was a design change we made in the middle of the development, when the game was far already very complete. There was a lot of booing from the staff.

Q: It sounds like jumping became more intuitive, and less quantitative.

Miyamoto: Exactly. But that’s the decisive difference between 2D and 3D. At the same time, it’s what accounts for the dynamism players enjoy in a 3D game. The essence of what makes a 2D game “fun” is entirely different.

Q: The way Mario’s face moves is really great too. Like in the opening scene.

Miyamoto: That actually came from a prototype for Mario Paint 3D (that we’re still going to release). Skin animation, as it’s called, is a fairly standard thing in the world of animation, but I think this is the first time it’s actually been included in a game.

By the way, that nightmare fuel up above comes from a very old Dengeki feature. It looks like there was some sort of motion capture that went into creating the intro for Super Mario 64, or perhaps this was part of the planning/testing for Mario Paint 3D.