Nintendo patron saint Shigeru Miyamoto created the Mario franchise, but he knows it would be nothing without the countless devs and designers who helped bring it to life. The original Super Mario Bros. platformer from 1985 would have especially suffered, Miyamoto thinks, had it been the responsibility of only one person.
Nintendo Everything shares an interview Miyamoto did with Japanese magazine Casa Brutus earlier this summer. The director reveals that many of the game's most beloved qualities came from simply bouncing ideas around in the office.
The B-dash, which lets you press B while Mario is sprinting to slip past gaps in terrain, is one example. The plumber with a mustache – the walrus 'stache that launched a thousand ships – wouldn't be able to perform "that small cheat," says Miyamoto, if it weren't for a collaborative discussion about game bugs.
"That was actually a bug caused by flawed collision detection with the ground," Miyamoto explains. "When the programmer noticed it, he said, 'Huh? He didn't fall!' and tried to fix it. But I said, 'No, no! It's fun if he can dash across – let's leave it as is!' [laughs]. So we kept it."
"There were tons of other fun techniques and hidden items born while developing Super Mario Bros.," Miyamoto continues. The bloated Cheep Cheep enemies, in particular, are an aspect of the platformer where, Miyamoto says, "I don't think I could have come up with it alone."
Designer Takashi Tezuka, who recently announced his retirement as Nintendo's executive officer, first thought of the bite-y pufferfish. "He was young then, and didn't yet have strong technical skills," says Miyamoto, "but he offered interesting ideas, like wanting to have a fish that suddenly leaps out and plops back down, that could both fly and swim."
"My younger colleague's idea had a certain appeal, and I wanted to accommodate it," says Miyamoto. So he decided to raise the floor's height in Super Mario Bros. to make it easier for Mario to dodge the Cheep Cheeps while retaining their status as pesky, red surprises.
"If Mario is running on the lowest level they’ll appear unexpectedly, but if he’s on a some- what higher platform, players can see the fish fly up. That's why World 2-3, where Cheep Cheeps appear, takes place on higher piers," Miyamoto explains.
"None of these things could have been done by one person alone. I believe it’s because we created it together, by discussion and argument as a team, that the game came about. I always want information to flow back and forth freely, so I even banned headphones in the office."
He continues, "Rather than divide work strictly by specialty, we all helped shape the whole game together, and the fun was in doing that. Even now, I still work with people from that team: the graphic artist I just cited, Mr. Tezuka, programmer Toshihiko Nakago, and composer Koji Kondo. I think that in itself is pretty amazing."
