Miyamoto/Tezuka tease new direction for Mario series, talk dev tools

A portion of a Time interview with Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka...

On internal Mario development tools:

“The tools that we use internally on the developer team for creating levels are much more complicated than what you see from an interface standpoint–our tools use a keyboard and mouse. By moving the toolset over to the Wii U GamePad and giving it the touchscreen interface, it’s really lowered the hurdle for everyone being able to design with this piece of software. And then it was just a matter of finding the right number of icons onscreen to have people tapping to do the things that they wanted to do.” - Tezuka

On taking Mario in a new direction with future games:

“Doing this now at the 30th anniversary [of Super Mario Bros.] is really putting some more of that creativity into the players. But at the same time, we as the developers feel that it’s time for us to move in a new direction, and we’re preparing to work on the future of Super Mario from here on.” - Miyamoto