Wii

For this last interview, I would like to ask Miyamoto-san, the creator of Mario, and the person in charge of game design for Super Mario Galaxy.

Thank you.

Miyamoto-san, there are so many things that I would like to ask you in this interview. To start things off, I would like to ask you about the Co-Star mode, which is a very important element of Super Mario Galaxy.

The Tokyo staff really worked hard to make Co-Star mode into the great shape that it is now.

Ever since the first Mario Bros., I think the topic of cooperative gameplay has been a secular challenge that you knew had to be resolved. Back at HAL Laboratories when I was working on Kirby Super Star for the SNES, the helper system in that game was born from a challenge that you had given me.

That’s right! (laughs)
Cooperative gameplay definitely was a task that was on my mind all these years. In New Super Mario Bros.¹, I had worked on the Mario vs. Luigi mode² for a very long time to make it the way it is in the finished product.

*1.	New Super Mario Bros. is a side-scrolling action game that was released on the Nintendo DS in May, 2006.
*2.	Mario vs. Luigi is the cooperative gameplay mode in the New Super Mario Bros.

So Miyamoto-san, aren’t you feeling a sense of completion, that you had accomplished your
long running challenge that spanned for about a quarter of a century, ever since the birth of Mario Bros.?

I think so. Everytime I worked on a game, I had always continued to talk to people about the importance of cooperative gameplay, and my staff, who remembered what I had been saying,
were also proactive in that challenge.
They were probably working on it so hard because they must have thought that if they didn’t start working on it, they knew I was going to go after them asking "Hey, what ever happened to that?"

(laughs)

But there’s a part of me that’s stubborn.
As I am happy to hear the staff suggest new ideas, at the same time, I also think that they’re taking it lightly.

You want them to think it’s not that easy.

There were times I even told them off for it.
But at the same time, while I was telling them that it wasn’t going to be easy, I really wanted to overcome this challenge.
Now that we were able to use a pointer on Wii, I started to put in all the things that I wanted to do in cooperative mode using this feature.

Towards the end of development, you had clearly defined what you could do in single-player play and what you could do in two-player play.

The single-player mode became too complicated. It became much cleaner after some of the features were taken out, so they would only be used in the Co-Star mode.
"Playing with two people" is so easy to put in words,
but that’s all good only if both of the players are playing against each other under equal terms.
In games like a side-scrolling game where one player is the main player, the role of the second player becomes less important.
For these types of games, it has been a challenge that I had put upon myself to pursue whether the second player would be able to truly enjoy the gaming experience. With those games, it always seems like the second player is being forced to play, and it didn’t feel that much fun.

If the first player is enjoying the game much more than the second player, the second player
is just playing to make the first player happy.

That’s right, you end up playing just to entertain the other player. That’s why I wanted to make
it so the second player can enjoy the experience as well.
Of course, people who play together usually have some sort of relationship to each other, and that relationship comes in to help solve this issue.
For example, two good friends can have fun no matter what they play. But as an action game, I wanted the second player to also enjoy the experience.
And by utilizing the pointer on the Wii Remote, I think we were able to have the second player play the game with a very strong sense that they are involved with the game.
During the earlier stages of development, the person assisting the main player was able to spin by shaking the Wii Remote and jump with the A Button. We ended up taking those features out because we felt that they got in the main player’s way.
Getting in the other player’s way can be a fun part of gameplay, but in the end, I think we were able to put everything together nicely by finalizing it all into a cooperative Co-Star mode.

I heard that you invited a lot of people to play this game.

Quite a lot. We had parents bring their children to our office so they could all play together, we invited the elderly who were over 50 . . . Of course, I’m also over 50 myself . . .
Anyways, we had a lot of people play the game. We observed them, and we had them write reports of what they felt. I read through those reports thinking things like, "He wrote that the game is fun, but he didn’t look like he was having fun . . . " and how one person wrote that they enjoyed the game more as the levels became harder.

How do you imagine people will be playing with the Co-Star mode?

What I originally had in mind, were situations like where a parent would be sitting by their child, and say, the mother would assist her child playing. I also think it would be great if the opposite happens. The mother would control Mario, and her child would assist his mother saying "Mom, there’s a bad guy over here!" A parent and child playing a game as they help each other, was something that I wanted to bring to a reality for a long time, and with Super Mario Galaxy,
I feel a conviction that situations like this can really happen. Sitting side-by-side, people will have a great time teaching the beginner, and I think the two will be able to have a lot of fun as it opens up a new way for people to communicate.

To those people who are not used to playing a 3D game, I think how you are able to use the pointer to show them where to go next, greatly expands the "situation" where this game would
be played.