Miyamoto on Mario and Zelda's inception, making 3D cameras, how he comes up with ideas

A portion of an NPR interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...

NPR: : 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.

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.

NPR: Mario, I think of as an Italian name, and you're a Japanese game maker. How did you think to name him Mario?

SM: 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.' "

NPR: 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?

SM: 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.

NPR: Many people have commented on the things you've invented in video games — like the camera angle. You're not an engineer, so how did you come up with these different angles on Mario and using the camera when nobody had really done that before?

SM: So when I was younger I used to draw my own comics, and in school I studied industrial design. So from both of those past experiences, I was always thinking about what's the right angle to draw a picture from or to view something from and was constantly thinking about perspective in that sense.

When were first making games and we were making them in 2-D, creating games in two dimensions is a lot like drawing pictures. But when 3-D technology came along, and we began to create games using polygonal models, we were no longer just creating pictures — we had objects that we were having to show. And in order to show those 3-D solid objects, you had to begin worrying about where the camera would be placed, how it would maneuver around the object. And we stopped creating pictures and we instead started creating story flows for the flow of scenes in the game and things like that. And as we were working through that process, it dawned on me that, yes there's a main character in the game, but there's also the camera. And we need people to understand why the camera is moving — so the camera itself is almost like a character.

So we came up with this idea that there was Mario, and there's a character who's carrying the camera and that they're going on an adventure together. And so then what we did — if you look up, we have a poster here, and there's a character there whose name in English is Lakitu, and he's a turtle who flies around on a cloud from the Super Mario Bros. games. We thought he was the perfect character to be holding the camera as he floats around on his cloud and follows Mario on this adventure. And then I realized that nobody in the world had hit upon this idea, and I got very excited about it and put a lot of effort into conveying this in the game, and we finalized the game with this idea attached to it.

NPR: Your work has a sense of inventiveness. How do you come up with ideas? Do you sort of lie around and things just emerge in your mind — like, oh, I'm going to do this now with Mario?

SM: Well, when we first started we were starting with arcade games where you would put in a quarter and play a game — we needed to design the game in a way that you would want to put in the next quarter to keep playing. From there it changed to where we were creating worlds, and we were trying to create worlds that people would want to immerse themselves in, the way you immerse yourself in a book or in a movie.

And then, after that, as I got older I began to realize the things that I was doing in my life at that point as I was older — things like swimming or sports or when I got a dog — that these were experiences that I could take and apply the mechanics and the system of a video game and turn those experiences into something that others could enjoy and experience. So it really has been a process of how to take my experiences and find ways to apply them to video games, and that's evolved over time.