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IGN - Current, former Nintendo employees share Mario's influence on their careers
Yoshihiko Maekawa, Producer of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
I don’t know if [Super Mario Bros 3] was a direct influence on how I was thinking about game developer in general, but I can say that it did have a specific impact on one of the very early planning meetings that we were holding when we were talking about what sort of RPG we would create for a Mario world. We’d been talking back and forth, and none of us were coming up with any really good ideas. The whole time through, though, we were playing the action Mario games, because we wanted to get a feel for it and generate some ideas. And we’d gotten so tired of playing those games over and over again that we got to a point where we said, “You know what? Maybe we should play two-player together for a while.” It was that moment, when we saw Mario and Luigi working together in the game, that we thought, “This would be a really good are to focus on in creating this RPG series.” So that might have been the biggest influence here.
Akira Ohtani, Producer at Nintendo
One thing that really struck me when I was playing Super Mario Bros. 3 was the addition of the Tanuki Mario and Kuribo’s Shoe. I loved how cute those elements were, and how easy they were to play with. I was working somewhere else at the time, but I’d always been interested in the action Mario games, and I really liked to see how the gameplay had evolved, from a game that was only about jumping and running to suddenly having new elements where you could hop into a shoe and not take damage or put on this furry suit. I felt like it really expanded the gameplay concepts in an interesting way
Jim Merrick, Former Technical Director of Nintendo of America
I came to think of Mario as a colleague, not in the facilities management sense as a plumber, but as the guy who brought to life so many of Nintendo's new products and technologies. When we talked about stereoscopic scanning LED arrays in Virtual Boy, Peer's eyes glazed over until he saw Mario playing tennis; when we waxed poetic about tri-linear MIP map interpolation and Non-Uniform Rational B-spline Surfaces (NURBS) in the Reality Engine, Matt nodded his head appropriately, but he didn't get it until Mario stood in Super Mario 64 and scratched his 3D butt. Nothing really launched at Nintendo without Mario's approval, he is as much a part of the executive team as much as anyone.
That said, probably thing I most remember about Mario--that I really can't get out of my head no matter how hard I try--is his voice (played by Charles Martinet): "Itsa me, Mario!" "Hoo Hoo! 'ere we go!"
Link
I don’t know if [Super Mario Bros 3] was a direct influence on how I was thinking about game developer in general, but I can say that it did have a specific impact on one of the very early planning meetings that we were holding when we were talking about what sort of RPG we would create for a Mario world. We’d been talking back and forth, and none of us were coming up with any really good ideas. The whole time through, though, we were playing the action Mario games, because we wanted to get a feel for it and generate some ideas. And we’d gotten so tired of playing those games over and over again that we got to a point where we said, “You know what? Maybe we should play two-player together for a while.” It was that moment, when we saw Mario and Luigi working together in the game, that we thought, “This would be a really good are to focus on in creating this RPG series.” So that might have been the biggest influence here.
Akira Ohtani, Producer at Nintendo
One thing that really struck me when I was playing Super Mario Bros. 3 was the addition of the Tanuki Mario and Kuribo’s Shoe. I loved how cute those elements were, and how easy they were to play with. I was working somewhere else at the time, but I’d always been interested in the action Mario games, and I really liked to see how the gameplay had evolved, from a game that was only about jumping and running to suddenly having new elements where you could hop into a shoe and not take damage or put on this furry suit. I felt like it really expanded the gameplay concepts in an interesting way
Jim Merrick, Former Technical Director of Nintendo of America
I came to think of Mario as a colleague, not in the facilities management sense as a plumber, but as the guy who brought to life so many of Nintendo's new products and technologies. When we talked about stereoscopic scanning LED arrays in Virtual Boy, Peer's eyes glazed over until he saw Mario playing tennis; when we waxed poetic about tri-linear MIP map interpolation and Non-Uniform Rational B-spline Surfaces (NURBS) in the Reality Engine, Matt nodded his head appropriately, but he didn't get it until Mario stood in Super Mario 64 and scratched his 3D butt. Nothing really launched at Nintendo without Mario's approval, he is as much a part of the executive team as much as anyone.
That said, probably thing I most remember about Mario--that I really can't get out of my head no matter how hard I try--is his voice (played by Charles Martinet): "Itsa me, Mario!" "Hoo Hoo! 'ere we go!"
Link