Subtitles section Play video
-
This is Shigeru Miyamoto.
-
If you've played video games any time in the past 30 years, you're probably familiar with his work.
-
"Donkey Kong", "Zelda", "Star Fox".
-
And then, of course, this guy: "It's a me, Mario!"
-
When Miyamoto makes games, he always tries to do things differently than other designers.
-
Here he is back in 1998, explaining why he wasn't focused on online gaming.
-
(Japanese) It's a trend. And I try to avoid all trends.
-
And why he wasn't adding small in-game purchases to "Mario" for iPhone in 2016.
-
(Japanese) Everyone was saying I had to do it... but I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to be told 'that's the way you do it'.
-
Miyamoto has helped define a lot of what makes a video game great.
-
So how does he do it?
-
(Japanese) I think that first is that a game needs a sense of accomplishment.
-
(Japanese) And you have to have a sense that you have done something, so that you get the sense of satisfaction of completing something.
-
In 1981, one of Miyamoto's first assignments at Nintendo was to design a replacement for a game called "Radar Scope".
-
It had performed poorly in the U.S., leaving the company with 2,000 unsold arcade units.
-
And this is what he came up with:
-
Miyamoto based the story on the love triangle in "Popeye" between a bad guy, a hero, and a damsel in distress.
-
But since Nintendo couldn't secure the rights to use those characters, Miyamoto replaced them with a gorilla, a carpenter, and his girlfriend.
-
In later games, that carpenter became a plumber.
-
And his named changed, from Mr. Video, to Jumpman, and then to Mario, after this guy, the landlord of a Nintendo warehouse. near Seattle.
-
This was one of the first times that a video game's plot and characters were designed before the programming.
-
(Japanese) Well, early on, the people who made video games, they were technologists, they were programmers, they were hardware designers.
-
(Japanese) But I wasn't. I was a designer, I studied industrial design, I was an artist, I drew pictures.
-
(Japanese) And so I think that it was in my generation that people who made video games really became designers rather than technologists.
-
That change in approach came at a key time for video games.
-
When "Donkey Kong" was first released in 1981, the video game market in North America was on the verge of collapse.
-
It was saturated with a lot of different consoles, and the boom in home computers made a lot of people question why they would want a separate device just to play games.
-
But the storytelling in games like "Super Mario Bros" and "The Legend of Zelda"—which you could only play on Nintendo's own hardware—helped set them apart as best-sellers.
-
(Speaking Japanese) When I approach the design of my games, what I have to think about is how I'm showing a situation to a player, conveying to them what they're supposed to do.
-
In "Mario" you keep moving to the right to reach the end goal.
-
In "Donkey Kong" you keep climbing up to rescue the captured princess.
-
A lot of Miyamoto's genius can be seen in the first level of "Super Mario Bros".
-
This is probably the most iconic level in video game history.
-
It's designed to naturally teach you the game mechanics while you play.
-
If you look at a breakdown, there's a lot of really subtle design work going on here.
-
Though Mario is usually at the center of the screen, in this first scene he starts at the far left.
-
All the empty space to the right of him gives you a sense of where to go.
-
Now this character's look and movement suggest it's harmful.
-
But don't worry.
-
If you run into it, you'll just start the game over without much of a penalty.
-
Next, you see gold blocks with question marks.
-
These are made to look intriguing, and once you hit one, you're rewarded.
-
That then encourages you to hit the second block, which releases a mushroom.
-
Even if you're scared of what it might be, the positioning of the first obstacle makes it just about guaranteed that you're gonna run into this thing.
-
And once you do, Mario gets bigger and stronger.
-
And just like that, you've learned all the basic rules in the game without having to read a single word.
-
(Japanese) What else is there?
-
(Japanese) The last is the immersive quality of the game, being able to feel like it's a world you're immersed in, that you've become a hero.
-
(Japanese) That you've become brave. Even if you're actually crying.
-
Immersiveness in a video game has a lot to do with the controls—the more precisely you can move your character, the more you feel like you're part of the story.
-
And Nintendo has always been a pioneer with controllers.
-
It was the first to have the classic setup of the directional pad on the left and buttons on the right.
-
The first to have left and right shoulder buttons.
-
The first to have a 360-degree thumbstick.
-
And the first to bring motion control to the mass market.
-
But with 2016's "Super Mario Run", Nintendo, for the first time, made a game for a controller it didn't design: the iPhone.
-
(Speaking Japanese) Over time, not as many people have been playing Mario games.
-
(Speaking Japanese) And we ask ourselves: Why have people stopped playing “Mario”?
-
(Speaking Japanese) And for people who played early and then stopped playing, oftentimes it's because the controls got too difficult.
-
The Wii U flopped when it came out in 2012, and Nintendo 3DS sales are far below those of its predecessor.
-
But the number of American gamers playing on mobile phones has doubled to more than 164 million between 2011 and 2015.
-
You can think of “Super Mario Run” as a shift from immersiveness to accessibility.
-
(Speaking Japanese) I think the end result is a game anyone can play, for first-time player to the most experienced ones.
-
And that's kind of been Miyamoto's design philosophy from the very start: make fun games that everybody can play.
-
The rest is in our hands.
-
(Japanese) These controls direct the characters, the better your eye-hand coordination, the better you do.