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Former Nintendo employee on Nintendo's "clinical, rigid" work style, creating Mario's face for Super Mario 64, SEGA patents causing trouble for StarFox, and Nintendo being money-focused nowadays
Giles Goddard worked at Nintendo for a number of years. He got his start being invovled with StarFox, and then eventually became an employee of Nintendo themselves. He worked for Nintendo up to the GameCube days, so he certainly put in some time with the comapny. In an intervienw with Eurogamer, Goddard discusses a number of elements about Nintendo, including their work style, working on Super Mario 64, and how he believes the company's focus has shifted.
EU: You have an image of Nintendo - or certainly I did - that it's like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, this magical world where all the games come from.
GG: No, it's a factory.
EU: Was there any sense of occasion, that you were doing something big?
GG: Never. We had this game, we had a schedule and we had to do it otherwise... Well, who knows what would happen.
EU: So there was no sense of magic?
GG: Not at all. I don't think there is now either. It's such a clinical, rigid way of working. It amazes me they get so much creativity out of that place, with Zelda and Mario. You go there and it's white, it's clinical cubicles and bells ringing for lunch and for going home and that's it. How they get any creativity out of that place is beyond me. But they do do it.
EU: The team you worked with - Miyamoto, Eguchi, Watanabe - what were they like?
GG: They were great to work with. The individuals at Nintendo were all really good people, extremely talented. There's nothing wrong with the people - it's just the culture that was so old school.
EU: You did the famous Mario 64 face at the start of Super Mario 64 - how did you get that asset, how were you allowed to do that?
GG: When we got the Indys, they came with a camera. I put ping pong balls on my face and I thought it'd be cool to use the camera to control the face. And the justification was to test out the skinning - at that point, if you had two joints they'd be two separate objects. There was no smoothing. That's what I was experimenting in - how to do skinning. And a good demonstration of that was the Mario face. If you have a boss there that's seen this iteration of skinning, of facial animation - it's dicking around with a purpose, it's progressive and it's new stuff.
EU: Mario seemed significant because of how it seemed to fix 3D gaming, with its camera and everything, almost overnight.
GG: It took more than a year to realise that that was actually a viable gaming mechanic. At that point, 3D was so experimental that even the Mario team were questioning whether it was the right thing to do. Should the camera do this and that? Are we right to do this?
There was shit like with Sega having patents on pressing buttons to change camera views, so there was that side of things - whether we were actually legally entitled to do this camera view. It'd be unheard of nowadays - can you have this view, because Sega had this view? So Sega patented that, and we wanted to have that on Star Fox, and legal said you can't do that because Sega patented that. And we had to find a way around the patent.
That era was so patent driven, so rigid in what you could do and couldn't do - it wasn't as free-form, so much of a wild west as people think it was. You had to work around a lot of stupid rules and legal stuff, and people not knowing whether 3D should be this way or that.
EU: Has Nintendo changed that much since?
GG: It's much the same. It did change a bit after Iwata-san passed away. Now it's very focussed on money. Iwata was adamant that their core philosophy should be on the game, not on the money. Now it's almost entirely the money, which does worry me a bit.