Interview:Wired December 4th 2007

[1]

Wired News: What was your first experience with Mario, as a gamer? What was the first Mario game you played, and what kind of effect did it have on you?

Yoshiaki Koizumi: It was Super Mario Bros. I felt like it was a really difficult game.

WN: How old were you?

YK: About 21.

WN: So why was it so difficult?

YK: I didn’t get really far at all in Super Mario Bros. because I wasn’t really good at action games. The first time I played Famicom was in college, and I’d had no prior gaming experience whatsoever. Even though Famicom came out when I was in sixth grade, it was when I was in college that I borrowed one from a friend to play Super Mario Bros.

I realized on World 1-1 that I wasn’t really good at it at all. I kept dying. And it was at that point that it occurred to me, what do first-time players think of games like this? You jump right in and you just die over and over again. I found it a little easier to play Zelda, because Link has three hearts. It’s not like you touch something once and then you’re dead.

WN: You say that you were studying film in school?

YK: I was studying film, drama, and animation. I did some storyboarding as well.

WN: So what was your original career ambition?

YK: I wanted to be a film director.

WN: How did that end up changing? Did you go straight to Nintendo out of school?

YK: After graduation, I had the opportunity to be hired at Nintendo, and I went with it. And when you ask, "why Nintendo," my first opportunity to play a Nintendo system was in college, but my ambition had always been to make drama. That was my goal: Having a character, in a certain kind of world, having him go through a series of actions to accomplish something, and creating a dramatic tension throughout that. And games seemed like a really good opportunity to create a kind of drama that you don’t find in films. It was very interesting. And Nintendo was geographically very close to my university, Osaka University of Arts.

WN: That’s interesting because you don’t really hear about that kind of career path very often, somebody getting into video games in those days because of an interest in storytelling. When you got hired, what was your first job, what did they have you doing?

YK: My first assignment was to do the art and layout and eventually the writing for the manual for The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past. What was funny was that at the time, it didn’t seem like they’d really figured out what most of the game elements meant. So it was up to me to come up with story and things while I was working on the manual. So, for example, the design of the goddesses as well as the star sign associated with them.

WN: Have you seen things change since then, where the story is now coming from the game rather than the instruction manual?

YK: The situation is totally different now. There are so many people with so many different job titles. But back then, the people who wrote the manuals often became the people who came up with most of the backstory for the entire game. The first real game work that I did was on Link’s Awakening. But at the same time, I came in to write the manual, as I did on the previous game. But they had nothing in place. So I ended up making an entire story to go along with the game. The dream, the island, that was all mine.

And so that was my first experience doing the kind of work that we would now call "event design." But there were not too many people at the time with expertise in that area, so I really had free reign to do what I wanted, so long as I didn’t make Miyamoto angry.

WN: So, you’re coming in to Nintendo wanting to make dramatic stories in video games, and they tell you okay, make a manual. Did you tell them, no, I have no experience laying out art for a manual, this isn’t what I want to do? Or did it make a lot of sense to you that that would be the way that you started?

YK: I was just really having a good time with all the work they were giving me. I had plenty of experience drawing and writing in college, and so I was perfectly comfortable doing this. But every time someone told me, "work on this manual," and that involved drawing and writing, it usually ended up linking to some other task, where they’d say, "It’s also okay if you don’t mind working on this." So I was very much stimulated by all these possibilities.

WN: So after Link’s Awakening, was your work mostly concentrated on writing for the games themselves? Also, in a broader sense, Nintendo’s games don’t usually pursue big, dramatic stories. How would you compare that to the way other cinematic video games are done? What style is better for getting the story across?

YK: You’re right, EAD doesn’t tend to focus on the big story in most of their games. But I was the one coming up with scenarios, just on my own, ever since the time of Link’s Awakening. But even at that time, I felt like I came up with this entire scenario and a backstory for Link, but nobody really seemed to care. They were always saying, let’s not try to push the story forward too much.

So I would sort of try to find sneaky ways to get it in without them noticing too much. For example, I always liked the idea of you coming upon another character and hearing little bits of conversation that slowly begin to reveal different parts of the story. And that was the way that I tried to work on Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. A lot of the EAD games that do seem to have a lot of story, a lot of that came from my influence. But those are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn’t nearly as fond of and occasionally didn’t like.

WN: I always thought it was interesting that Miyamoto started off with Donkey Kong, pushing the idea of story in video games, makes this revolutionary game in which you have for the first time this narrative, this main character on a quest. And then immediately after Donkey Kong, he immediately pulls back from that, doesn’t want to do it anymore, just wants to concentrate on gameplay. And that seems to have set the tone for so much of EAD’s content for the last three decades.

YK: When you think about the whole "save the princess" storyline of games being one of Miyamoto’s inventions, I don’t think of that as a story so much as it is a goal. It’s a way of creating a situation. There’s not necessarily a buildup and a resolution of a deeper kind, like you’d find in a novel. It’s just a situation that motivates the players. Lacking that kind of detailed nuance, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in a story at all. It’s just that as a designer, my priorities are a little different. I tend to convey emotion in slightly different ways rather than just rely on the most obvious kind of narrative that we would think of when we think of storylines.

So Miyamoto gives you the goal, and that’s what you needed in Donkey Kong to play through and accomplish it with the right sense of motivation. And it’s true that Miyamoto may think of other things outside of that as perhaps extraneous. But that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong way to make games. It’s just two very different styles.

WN: And staying on that subject, one of the things that struck me the most out of Super Mario Galaxy were the storybook sequences. That was the closest a Mario game ever got to getting an emotional reaction out of me. Was that your influence?

YK: For a long time, it really felt like telling a story in a Mario game was something that wasn’t allowed. But I felt in this case that the Lumas and Rosalina really needed a story to explain what they were doing out there and to give the players a deeper understanding of their presence. So telling her story as a fairytale by reading the book to all the Lumas as if they were young children at storytime just seemed like the mood-appropriate way to accomplish this.

Dropping it into the game in the middle of the hub right there as something you could choose if you wanted to, I felt worked very well. If the book was standing all alone on its own, or if the game story was standing on its own, neither of them work very well as separate elements. But together, they reinforce each other quite nicely. And people have the option of hearing that story if they want to, or never going into that room if they don’t want to hear it. Even so, just making the children’s book was quite a feat. It was a bit of a struggle for us to get it done. And a couple things that we cut from the book ended up going into the main story as well. So it was a pretty good process.

WN: As director of Galaxy, you do a lot of work with Miyamoto. What was his contribution to this game? What was your job, translating between him and the rest of the design team?

YK: Mario has a creator, Miyamoto, and you have to consider Mr. Miyamoto’s thoughts when you’re making a Mario game. But we share thoughts back and forth first for quite a long time. And once I start to outline some really broad strokes about where we’re going with the game, then I can get a little more feedback from Miyamoto. Then, getting a version together, I have to go to Miyamoto as soon as possible as we can get more feedback.

Over time, as all of these broad ideas get a little more narrowly defined, the feedback becomes a little more subtle, until finally it gets to the point where Miyamoto will give us feedback, and the only person who has any idea what it means is me. And everyone else who is CC’ed on these emails from Miyamoto have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. So I’ll translate for everyone else, "I think he’s trying to say this." Having that sort of information gap is sort of like a puzzle or a riddle. It’s like playing Brain Age.

WN: Can you name a specific example of something Miyamoto said that people didn’t understand and you had to explain?

YK: One of the things that makes Miyamoto’s feedback so hard to understand is that none of his sentences have subjects. So you have to rely on context to understand a statement. But more than that, Miyamoto may not know himself what he’s trying to say. Or he may be intentionally vague just to spur thought, just to give people a chance to come up with their own ideas and not limit them to the types of solutions they might be able to find. And it’s always been like that. He’s always wanted to give far more abstract answers rather than clear answers. My role is to cut down that abstraction by giving a few examples of different solutions to problems they’re currently discussing, then sending them over to Miyamoto to see what kinds of reactions they get. I’m getting pretty good at it. We’ve been doing it for ten years.

WN: But can you name one specific thing?

YK: Probably the best example is the very inception of the idea for Galaxy. For the longest time, Miyamoto would say nothing more specific than, "Hey, can you make something with spherical worlds?" And that something had to be defined over a long period of time and eventually tuned into Super Mario Galaxy. But he kept saying that, "can’t you make something out of this whole spherical worlds concept?"

Certainly, it seems like Miyamoto has a reason for this level of abstraction. I feel like he’s making us work to solve these puzzles on purpose, because it’s a process that unlocks the creativity on our side. So even though Miyamoto might have some unformed ideas, the very fact that he would put all these challenges in front of us makes me feel very grateful, because it helps the process.

WN: Do you feel that at some point you’ll have to take over for Miyamoto and be the one putting these questions to people?

YK: Certainly, if that situation presents itself, I’ll be happy to do so. But I already feel like I’ve incorporated that style of working. When there are members of my team who come to me, even if I know the solution to the problem, I won’t give them the solution, just the direction. And they know what they’re supposed to do, from that point.

WN: Getting on to Galaxy specifically, the general opinion of the game is that it’s the true sequel to Super Mario 64 and that Sunshine is more of a spinoff — does your team see that as being the case?

YK: Maybe one of the reasons for that line of thought, that Sunshine wasn’t really in the line of spiritual progression of these games, and one of the reasons for that is that Miyamoto said that at one point. That Galaxy is the "true sequel" to Mario 64. But as far as the actual themes of the games, Sunshine is very much in my mind in that same progression. The whole idea, for me, is about the exploration of a hakoniwa, a miniature garden. It’s like a garden in a box, where if you look at it from different angles, you can see different plants and arrangements. And you have that sense of surprise and exploration. There’s always things you can find.

In terms of spiritual successors, I’ve never found that to be the case. Whereas with the Zelda series, each game seems to follow pretty closely from the last with a few stylistic deviations. But Galaxy really feels like it went back to earlier roots with Super Mario Bros., in terms of trying to find that same tempo, that same feel. But for me, it’s a matter of thinking what to do with each next step. There’s nothing you really throw away. You think about these ideas and refine them constantly with every iteration of a game series. So for all the camera problems that you may have found in Mario 64 and Sunshine, even though we didn’t realize how to fix those problems then, those solutions presented themselves over time and found their way into this game. I feel like you really can’t have Galaxy without all of the things we learned from Sunshine.

WN: What’s interesting is that Galaxy takes a step more towards linearity. You don’t have any worlds in Galaxy that look like Mario 64′s big sandbox areas where there’s seven or eight stars all in one big location. Galaxy‘s more point A to point B. Why cut down on that exploration?

YK: In the process of developing, we used this metaphor of a hakoniwa very often. But creating a hakoniwa is actually incredibly difficult, because there are so many layered elements that have to work together. In the case of creating a multi-objective level, where you can have several different paths and routes through it to different objectives, we have to blend together, but not create obstructions, where you have to pass over the same terrain. So it requires a lot of thinking just to layer those pieces on top of each other in ways that don’t obstruct each other. But not only that, it has to actually work. It has to be fun.

A lot of the work that I did on Sunshine, thinking about how to keep those elements all working together when you have multiple paths in a single stage, was very much applied to Galaxy in coming up with the "zone system," which is kind of a simplified version. We have all of these modular elements, different planets, and flight paths in between them. So being able to move around those different modules made it so much easier to adjust the balance of difficulty and keep the paths from obstructing each other. In that sense, setting this game in space was an evolution along that line of thinking. This is really one of the best ways to create a hakoniwa with those different attributes.

WN: With New Super Mario Bros. on the DS having been a really huge hit in Japan, selling nearly five million units, the biggest-selling DS game, and Galaxy having sold much less, about a tenth of that, what lesson should we take? Does that say something about the DS player versus the Wii player? Does that say something about 2-D versus 3-D gameplay and what resonates with people?

YK: I don’t really follow sales numbers very closely. So I actually wasn’t aware of the sales numbers for either game in that early first period. But if I had to take a guess, I’d say that the needs are very different for each person who wants a portable game system that they can carry with them everywhere versus someone who wants a system for the home. These are different types of people and that would have some effect on sales.

WN: It’s difficult to get other developers to put the effort into big-budget Wii titles. Knowing that Super Mario 64 blazed a trail in getting people to develop for the analog stick, do you hope that Galaxy will have a similar effect?

YK: It’s a little bit hard for me to say. I don’t feel that I am familiar enough with other video game development companies to be able to answer the question directly. But every company produces very different types of games from Nintendo. I don’t feel like there’s so much in common there. But if people really like this game and if there’s demand there, I could imagine that other companies might capitalize on the success of the title and try to produce something similar to it.

WN: So, with Mario Galaxy finished, what’s next?

YK: Well, considering that Galaxy only just finished, we’re still thinking about that. But the type of development that happens at EAD Tokyo is sort of a project style of development. People all have all kinds of different things going on, and we try to make that come together to form a game. So I really have to go back to Tokyo and talk to my staff and have everyone bring all of their ideas to the table.

WN: The "spherical worlds" conversation had been going on for a long time. And you can see that in older interviews, building up towards Super Mario Galaxy. Is there anything like that going on right now, any "it would be interesting if a game did this" conversation happening now?

YK: When making Galaxy, there were a lot of ideas that didn’t make it into the final product. And those are very likely to go into the next game that I work on. But having said that, there’s no real demo, a proof of concept tech demo or anything like that — it’s just ideas, at this point.

WN: Mario Galaxy made some use of the Wii remote, in certain areas. But it wasn’t really heavy use of the Wii remote. Do you want to try a game that makes more heavy use of the Wii remote’s functions?

YK: When we first learned about the concept of the Wii, and were given prototypes, we researched exhaustively: What things are fun to do? What do people want to use it for? From those concepts, we came up with a lot of things that could certainly become games, but at the same time, most of these are not Mario games. It’s not a Mario game if you’re not controlling Mario moving around. So there’s quite a bit of a challenge in applying a pointer function to that.

Certainly there are a lot of ideas out there that could become games, but none of them have really percolated to the point of an actual project, yet. I’m still cleaned out from having made Galaxy.