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Super Mario 64 1996 Interviews


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http://shmuplations.com/mario64/

I found some interesting interviews for Mario 64 last night and thought I would post it on here. They go over some of the design challenges they had, game design philosophy, physics programming for Mario, Mario's many animations, video programming in early 3d CG, and some missing features they would have wanted to add.  I ended up replaying Mario 64 last night and was thinking about the interviews. This part resonated with me while I was playing though:  

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—And in this case, that fundamental basis was the model you made with Mario and Luigi running around that room.

Miyamoto: Yes, it was being able to move Mario and Luigi around with the 3D control stick, and being able to change the camera view with the press of a button. One of our big development themes was letting the players move Mario around any way they wanted. We wanted to make a game where just moving Mario around was fun.

The controls were definitely nailed right, and how the idea of you being Mario persists. I can spend a long time just messing around the castle, the levels, the outside and still have a lot of fun just playing around as Mario. I also find it interesting how both Mario and Luigi were going to be playable characters at first in Mario 64, but that didn't happen for another 17 years with Super Mario 3D World. I feel like even though it would've been cool to play as Luigi, sacrificing the open level nature of Super Mario 64 wouldn't have been worth it. 

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I think what's weirder is how they still dropped the ball on adding Luigi in any capacity in Sunshine as well, I remember reading some quote from Miyamoto in like EGM back in the day where he's all coy about Luigi - and then it turned out to be nothing. Has there been any dev notes on that?

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1 hour ago, Stopdoor said:

Just 4 u N4A

IMG_20160924_184457644.jpg

It might have been that Luigi's Mansion wasn't revealed yet? Also I think they've always wanted to add multiplayer, but there were probably too many technical issues adding multiplayer for Mario games. The biggest one I can think of is the camera, and that had enough issues with just Mario. In addition with the camera, more polygons,textures would probably have to be drawn at once with a bigger camera view. We didn't really get any sort of multiplayer support for platforming Mario games until NSMBWii, and not for a mainline 3D Mario game until Super Mario 3D World. Even with Super Mario 3D world, the levels are fairly linear, and the cameras are fairly fixed.

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15 hours ago, Chrom said:

I guess it could be seen as a tease, but does it necessarily have to be one? It seems pretty normal for Miyamoto to respond that way regardless.

 

Well, I was actually misremembering it, it's not as teaser-ish as I remembered - the smile is definitely just an ambiguous thing. As a kid pre-Sunshine it got me hyped though.

 

13 hours ago, GENERALBEATRIX said:

It might have been that Luigi's Mansion wasn't revealed yet? Also I think they've always wanted to add multiplayer, but there were probably too many technical issues adding multiplayer for Mario games. The biggest one I can think of is the camera, and that had enough issues with just Mario. In addition with the camera, more polygons,textures would probably have to be drawn at once with a bigger camera view. We didn't really get any sort of multiplayer support for platforming Mario games until NSMBWii, and not for a mainline 3D Mario game until Super Mario 3D World. Even with Super Mario 3D world, the levels are fairly linear, and the cameras are fairly fixed.

 

Nah, Luigi's Mansion was a launch title, it's mentioned in the article. 

 

I'm more questioning why, y'know, Luigi doesn't even appear in any capacity at all? Not as an NPC, a reference, or anything? It's super weird that the "No. 2" of Mario was absent for multiple major games without even a reference.

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The idea of simply nailing the feel of it simply being fun to move the characters around in a 3D environment is one of the things that really set Nintendo apart from the rest when it came to a lot of games that generation and not just on the N64 either.  There were a lot of games that took some interesting risks and introduced some new ideas beyond what Nintendo did and while they were fun to experience they were often nowhere near as polished when it to actually controlling the in game characters.  And all this on the funky trident controller of all things.

 

I think that was part of the charm of really picking up and playing a game back then really managed to click in all the right areas where the fun of experiencing gaming in this new perspective wasn't just the game world itself but actually being able to navigate well within it.  I still remember that being part of the fun of playing the Mario 64 demo at Blockbuster every time we rented movies or an SNES game or something.  Just running across Bob Omb Battlefield and discovering new moves and ways of interacting with everything alone was about as fun actually making real progress to collect a given a star.

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