Shigeru Miyamoto is the creator of many of Nintendo's iconic video game franchises, including Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda. NPR's Laura Sydell interviewed the 62-year-old designer at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week.
Miyamoto spoke, through an interpreter, about the origins of his famous characters, how his life experiences inspire his creations and why Nintendo's latest console, the Wii U, failed to take off.
Laura Sydell: There's a new version coming out of Mario. I'm sure a lot of people who have played it wonder about the origin of Mario — how you first came up with the idea of a plumber named Mario.
Shigeru Miyamoto: The gameplay of Mario games originated early on with Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was a game where you were running on platforms and jumping over things — that came to be called a "platformer" style of video game (the genre was called "platforming"). Then it evolved from there, and we decided to try to incorporate more settings — things like the open air, the open sky, underwater and things like that. And to do that, we incorporated a side-scrolling mechanic where you scrolled sideways through the screens, and that became the base for the game that was Super Mario Bros. So that's the origin of the game play.
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And so I think that Mario became so popular because the actions in the Mario game are something that are innate to humans everywhere. Everyone is afraid of falling from a great height. If there is a gap that you have to cross, everyone is going to try to run to jump across the gap. These are things that are uniquely human and are a shared experience across, really, all people. And I think because of the simplicity of these experiences as well as the interactive nature of controlling the character and seeing the response on the game screen — that's what really resonated with people and made Mario such a popular character.
The plumber role of Mario is actually a different story. In Donkey Kong, Mario was actually a carpenter, and he was working on a building, and then the next game we made after that was a game called Mario Bros., and that was a game that was set in the sewers, and the pipes were green, and there were turtles coming out of the pipes. And so we thought, in this game, it would make sense that Mario would be a plumber because of all the pipes. And so that's where the plumber came from. But my vision of Mario has always been that he's sort of representative of everyone. He's kind of a blue-collar hero. And so that's why we chose these roles for him that were things like carpenters and plumbers.
Mario, I think of as an Italian name, and you're a Japanese game maker. How did you think to name him Mario?
So that's also an interesting story. When I was younger, I used to enjoy comics and drawing comics as well. And among the comics that I read, some were Italian comics. And if you think about it, the big nose and the mustache is not a facial feature that's characteristic of Japanese people. And so I think that my connection to those Italian comics — probably I drew on that inspiration when we first drew the character.
And so when we first drew the character in Donkey Kong, he was drawn using pixel dots in a 16x16 grid. So it was a very small space in which to draw the character, and it was a very small character on the screen. And so in order to emphasize the unique characteristics of the character, we made the big nose and the mustache and the overalls to make it easy to understand what the character was doing on the screen. When we sent the game to the U.S. to sell the Donkey Kong arcade games in America, in the warehouse that the Nintendo was operating out of in America at that time, there was somebody related to that warehouse whose name was Mario. And the staff at Nintendo in America said that the character looked like the individual named Mario. So they started calling the character Mario, and when I heard that I said 'Oh, Mario's a great name — let's use that.' "
And he has a hat.
He wears a hat because as I mentioned we had very few dots available to us to draw the character, and trying to draw hair that moves while you run would've been very complicated. So we gave him a hat to make it easier to draw but make him still look realistic.
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Many people always talk about how inventive your games are, and I have heard that your childhood — the sense of wonder you bring — comes from growing up in Japan. I heard a story about once you stumbled upon a lake when you were a child and that sense of wonder is what you try to bring to all of your games. Is that a true story?
That's correct. When I was younger, I grew up in the countryside of Japan. And what that meant was I spent a lot of my time playing in the rice paddies and exploring the hillsides and having fun outdoors. When I got into the upper elementary school ages — that was when I really got into hiking and mountain climbing. There's a place near Kobe where there's a mountain, and you climb the mountain, and there's a big lake near the top of it. We had gone on this hiking trip and climbed up the mountain, and I was so amazed — it was the first time I had ever experienced hiking up this mountain and seeing this big lake at the top. And I drew on that inspiration when we were working on the Legend of Zelda game and we were creating this grand outdoor adventure where you go through these narrowed confined spaces and come upon this great lake. And so it was around that time that I really began to start drawing on my experiences as a child and bringing that into game development.
When you work on updating games now, do you still bring your life experience into the game?
Yes, it happens very naturally. After I turned 40, I took up swimming and became very enthusiastic about swimming as a way of exercise. And right after that was when we made Super Mario 64, and I drew on a lot of my experience swimming in creating the underwater swimming scenes with Mario in that game.