Tag Archives: shigeru miyamoto

Miyamoto Shigeru Continues to Amaze Me

Posted on by

I recently wrote a post about “Mr. Mario” and his interview regarding New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I decided to take a look at other interviews he’s given, particularly the ones on the Wii’s Nintendo Channel, and as I watched them I realized just how different his mindset is compared to everyone else in the industry at this point. Yes, the fact that he’s a genius who has given birth to many of the great franchises of video game history isn’t anything new, but when you listen to him talk about games, it’s like he’s discussing an entirely foreign subject compared to his peers and contemporaries.

Everyone else is working from the mindset of “how do I foster competition,” or “how do I make this a more enjoyable experience,” or even “what is interactivity and what does it mean,” and they’re all valid questions worth answering, but in contrast the most important question that seems to pop up in Miyamoto’s head is “how do I make life better?” It’s not a matter of him being “better” than anyone else in game design so much as the fact that he’s playing another game entirely.

It’s as if when everyone else is trying to bring guns to a sword fight, Miyamoto brings a cup of tea.

Miyamoto Shigeru Agrees with Me

Posted on by

I previously made a post positing that one of the big changes that occurred in video game graphics around the NES era was that character’s began to have faces. Their eyes and mouths (or approximations thereof) made the characters more relatable.

While I thought it made perfect sense, I realize that aside from my visual analysis there wasn’t a whole lot of record and evidence to back it up. But then recently while reading the New Super Mario Bros. Wii interview, the creator of Mario himself Miyamoto Shigeru said something which helped support my theory immensely.

Iwata
Mario’s trademarks are his moustache, his hat and his overalls. Why did you decide to give him this look? I have no doubt you’ve spoken about this many times before, but I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you to tell us about it one more time.

Miyamoto
Certainly. The original Mario was a 16 X 16 pixilated image. At that time, when games made overseas used human characters, they were always rendered with life-like proportions.

Iwata
It felt as if the developers weren’t happy unless they’d drawn a figure that was eight-heads tall.

Miyamoto
Or sometimes it would be six-heads tall. But actually, the number of pixels we were able to use was so limited that, if we did that, we’d only have had a couple of pixels for the face.

Iwata
With two pixels, you wouldn’t even have been able to draw eyes. You’d basically have ended up with a matchstick figure. In early video games from overseas, that kind of figure often featured.

Miyamoto
And as they just didn’t resemble human figures, I was absolutely convinced that they’d been designed by people who couldn’t draw!

Iwata
(laughs)

Miyamoto
I thought it was most likely that it was the programmer who was drawing these figures. But I thought: “I know how to draw!” I mean, I’m not saying I can draw as well as an artist, but I was confident that I was better at drawing than a programmer. That’s why I started by saying: “Right, let’s draw something that actually looks like a person’s face!” So I drew the eyes, the nose, the mouth and…
Miyamoto goes on to talk about how in creating the face, it left him with very few pixels to actually design a body, and that Mario’s look was essentially dictated by function (Mario has a mustache so that they didn’t have to draw a mouth). What’s important in Miyamoto’s words is that he saw how most of the characters in games abroad were attempts to replicate a “realistic” human figure, and he still made an effort to give his character Mario some semblance of a personality by giving him facial features, even if those features were the result of limitations.
Certainly it wasn’t impossible or uncommon for games prior to Donkey Kong to have personality of their own, and Miyamoto certainly wasn’t the first to give facial features to his characters (Pac-Man being the most obvious example), it does show the kind of thinking that would go on to implicitly influence generations of gamers.