![]() So we gave him a hat to make it easier to draw but make him still look realistic. 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 they started calling the character Mario, and when I heard that I said 'Oh, Mario's a great name - let's use that.' " And the staff at Nintendo in America said that the character looked like the individual named Mario. 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 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. 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 I think that my connection to those Italian comics - probably I drew on that inspiration when we first drew the character.Īnd so when we first drew the character in Donkey Kong, he was drawn using pixel dots in a 16x16 grid. And if you think about it, the big nose and the mustache is not a facial feature that's characteristic of Japanese people. And among the comics that I read, some were Italian comics. When I was younger, I used to enjoy comics and drawing comics as well. Mario, I think of as an Italian name, and you're a Japanese game maker. And so that's why we chose these roles for him that were things like carpenters and plumbers. But my vision of Mario has always been that he's sort of representative of everyone. And so that's where the plumber came from. And so we thought, in this game, it would make sense that Mario would be a plumber because of all the pipes. 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. ![]() The plumber role of Mario is actually a different story. 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. These are things that are uniquely human and are a shared experience across, really, all people. If there is a gap that you have to cross, everyone is going to try to run to jump across the gap. Everyone is afraid of falling from a great height. Miyamoto, Father Of Mario And Donkey KongĪnd so I think that Mario became so popular because the actions in the Mario game are something that are innate to humans everywhere. So that's the origin of the game play.Īll Tech Considered The Legendary Mr. 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. ![]() 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. 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"). Shigeru Miyamoto: The gameplay of Mario games originated early on with Donkey Kong. 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. Laura Sydell: There's a new version coming out of Mario. 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. NPR's Laura Sydell interviewed the 62-year-old designer at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week. Shigeru Miyamoto is the creator of many of Nintendo's iconic video game franchises, including Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda. Shigeru Miyamoto plays the latest Mario game, called Super Mario Maker, at the Nintendo booth Wednesday at this year's E3 video game expo in Los Angeles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |