Earthbound – 1994 Developer Interview

Shigesato Itoi - Producer (Mother)
Hajime Kimura - Writer (Jungle Wars, Metal Max)

Kimura: I've written about this before in my critique column, but what you said about camerawork really struck a chord with me. Since I come from more of a literary background, I tend to think about games in terms of perspective--whether this is a first-person, second-person, or third-person experience. Yet I often feel that games are cut frame-by-frame, so to speak: that there isn't a lot of conscious intent from the creator's side for things like camerawork or perspective. How did you handle that in Mother 2?

Itoi: Well, I can say for certain that the catalyst for wanting to make games myself was the influence of Dragon Quest. What was most interesting about it was the first-person perspective. The world is something 'I' bring to life, expanding it piece by piece with every new clue. You can't get that kind of excitement from a novel; the level of immersion is completely different, in other words.

People toss around the word "interactive" a lot, but I never imagined I could actually get that involved myself. Ultimately, a game is at its best when the player's imagination and the creator's imagination multiply together. The tricky thing is, though, you usually shouldn't count on the consumer's imagination when you're making a commercial product.

Kimura: That's true.

Itoi: In short, most products basically coddle the consumer, wrapping them in cotton wool so they don't feel any pain or discomfort, and then just carrying them along. But when I played Dragon Quest, I thought, "Wait, this is different. They're actually counting on me." I found that incredibly interesting as a player. It made me want to be counted on even more. And then, I wanted to create that myself.

When a game is truly interactive, worn-out words like "love" and "justice" start to feel vivid and alive. In a book if you wrote "For the sake of love!", people would just laugh, but in a game, you can experience it firsthand: "Ah, this part here... this is where I felt it." Because of all the time you've put in leading up to it, in a game, a word can truly come alive for the first time. I fell in love with that idea and consequently dipped my toes into game production, which led to Mother 1, though looking back, you could really tell it was made by an amateur.

In advertising, I have some idea of how to pull the consumer over to my side, but I couldn't do that with games at first. Working on my second game I started to feel like a pro in this industry… it's not such a long history, I know. (laughs) But that was when I realized, OK, this is the kind of experience I want players to have. With Mother 2, I wanted to see if we could commit 100% to a first-person feel while keeping the best parts of a third-person perspective.

Kimura: I still have the feeling that for first-person, 3D is the way to go.

Itoi: Like the world of Wizardry.

Kimura: Yeah. But 3D games lack a certain objectivity. For example, if I don't know how big a village is, I don't feel like walking around it.

Itoi: Right. A human's field of vision is about 180 degrees. We can see all around us, and we also have a memory. But in Wizardry, "memory" is nothing more than a route on a map. And in that sense, I feel that the way first-person is used is a bit restrictive, and lacking in immersion. If I'm walking through Kanda, for example, I already have a sense of where I am. For Mother I thought we could choose a perspective that better captures that feeling of being in a location, rather than the limited first-person perspective of Wizardry.

Right now the problem with camerawork in games is that there are hardware and software limitations. The current way of solving it, where you have to store data for every single possible camera angle... that doesn't feel like the right approach to me. I'd like to do something about that eventually. Baseball games use several different camera angles, but that's not quite what I'm after either. (laughs) When you go to a stadium, you're free to look wherever you want. But you can't actually direct a scene if you guarantee that level of freedom to the player.

For my part, while it's not camerawork per se, in Mother I kept my promise not to put names at the start of dialogue to show who's speaking. Even in Dragon Quest, when they did that I felt a sense of betrayal. (laughs)

Kimura: I'm guilty of doing that in my games. (laughs)

Itoi: I understand why they do it. I'm not some revolutionary demanding we "return to the basics," but I really wanted to try another way.

Kimura: If the situation makes it clear who's speaking, I'd prefer to do it your way. If there's a speech bubble, it's possible, or if the character's movement make it obvious.

Itoi: Exactly. You can use clever direction. However, it's tough when two NPCs are talking to each other. We struggled with that quite a bit in Mother. Ultimately, we managed it with direction, but sticking to that approach can sometimes feel like it borders on pointless effort…

Kimura: It's difficult. For example, where are the player's eyes? Are they on the moving character, or on the text? Lately, I feel like players aren't looking at the text. That's also quite tough. I want them to read the words.

Itoi: Ultimately, the story doesn't develop unless you bump into someone and press the talk command, and repeating that style forever is very restrictive.

Kimura: That does bother me. For instance, you go into a room, and unless you go right up to the person, they just watch you in silence while you look for something or take something nearby. That's just weird.

Itoi: That's why I made the other characters move around a lot more this time for Mother 2.

Kimura: Doing that probably makes the development take a lot longer, and it also depends on how well-equipped your game creation tools are.

Itoi: Well, what should have been a simple matter of "just adding some movement" turned out to be a huge ordeal. We were bogged down for the longest time. It dragged out the whole development.

Kimura: A human being has to manually direct every single piece of it.

Itoi: But what made me happy this time with Mother 2 was that the deeper intent behind those choices spread to everyone like a virus. People started coming up with great ideas on their own. As a director, when that happens, you've won. It happens in movies sometimes, where the director doesn't have to give acting instructions: the actors just know what to do. It's the biggest thrill for me when I can say "Yes, your way is much better than what I was thinking!"

Kimura: I think there are two ways to look at it. We use the title "game designer," but in reality, that role is often split up. One person handles the story, another the dialogue, and another the direction. But when I think about the best way to make a game, I lean toward the other path: being the person who spreads that "virus" and takes ultimate responsibility for the taste of the entire game… someone acting as a true director.

Unfortunately, once you start having to make multiple games a year, that director role starts to take over, and you often lose the ability to do the actual creative work yourself, like writing the dialogue. In your case, Itoi, doing both the directing and writing the dialogue took five years (laughs), and I get the sense that was an ordeal.

Itoi: Indeed it was. As for the dialogue, this time we had some survivors from my Manryuu Copywriting School1 on the team. I've known them for a long time, and they helped out a lot with things like the item descriptions. I'm really glad I was able to create a place where people from a humanities background could contribute. Game development is about people, not just technical functionality. If you only chase after function, the game will die.

Kimura: Looking at the industry as a whole, I think a big question is how can we pull in more people from the humanities. Honestly, I was so happy when you entered the game industry. To me, it wasn't about you being a copywriter or a novelist specifically—it was the fact that you were a "liberal arts" guy. The real challenge is how we can foster an environment that actually lets people like that thrive.

Itoi: Artists are "liberal arts" people too, aren't they? That's right. In the end, it's all about sense and sensibility.

Kimura: That's why I want to make games where the artists and the storywriters are the "main characters" of the development.

Itoi: And then there's the music.

Kimura: Music plays a big part.

Itoi: We used 8 megabits for the music on our end. (laughs) Everyone grimaces when I mention that.

Kimura: That's… incredible. (laughs)

Kimura: When people hear "8 megabits," the critics say, "If you're eating up that much for music, you must be neglecting the rest of the game," but that's not true at all. In our case, the music just kept growing, and I kept saying "okay, okay," until finally it reached 8 megabits. I also made sure to get a promise, before we even started, that I would still have unlimited space for the dialogue.

Kimura: How many megabits is the game in total?

Itoi: 24.

Kimura: So one third… wow.

Itoi: Ultimately, music is the only thing that can truly control time. In a concert, you can hold an audience rapt for two hours with music alone. When you think about it that way, the music shouldn't just be left to a programmer because he "knows a bit about music." That doesn't cut it anymore.

Kimura: Still though… one-third just for music. That's wild.

Itoi: You can thank this selfish team of ours. If I'd been rigid about it--"this is all you get!"--no one would have ever come up with these ideas. (laughs)

Kimura: No, they wouldn't. We allocated a little over 1 megabit for the music this time.2 At the initial stage, we talk about how to keep the music memory down and limit the sample data as much as possible. On the other hand, we decided to take an active stance and not use any tones other than classical this time. All classical, from start to finish. So you inevitably have to think about reducing the tones and somehow saving memory.

Itoi: Because Mother is set in the modern world, it wouldn't work if the music sounded worse than the stuff you hear on the radio every day. So right from the start, we were dead set on getting the music right. Even so, we really went overboard. (laughs) If you put it all on CD, it would easily be a double album.

Kimura: 8 megabits though, that's just amazing.

Itoi: I think we got the quality of the music to a point where nobody could possibly complain.

Kimura: When you have that much space, you can really use sound to direct the experience in all sorts of ways. You rarely see a game where the staging changes so dramatically based on whether sound is guiding the scene or not.

Itoi: You and I work in commercials, and we often see edits without music, so that experience is probably coming into play. And of course it's also vital to have a good melody maker. Having those two maestros, Keiichi-kun and Tanaka, that was huge.

Kimura: Given how production budgets are these days, you usually start out by breaking the bad news: "We can't really spare much cash for the music department…" (laughs)

Itoi: It's the same in every field, but too many creators end up self-censoring before anyone even complains. For me, pretending to be an amateur was the ultimate loophole. I had to pretend I didn't know the rules so I could run ahead with my ideas.

If we'd sat down and tried to discuss it rationally, a game like Mother 2 would never have happened. When you audit a pitch document in a meeting, everyone always arrives at the exact same safe conclusion. It becomes a battle of logic versus logic, so you naturally end up picking the path with the least risk and that gets locked in as your baseline. But I believe what the industry needs today is to stop talking about risk altogether and start talking about what it costs to make something great. And so dedicating 8 megabits to music was a cost we chose to bear.

Kimura: Strictly speaking, culture is a luxury. It's not a necessity. That's why, in a sense, the people who possess the freedom to create culture have an obligation to do so. Because for humanity, this kind of creative expression isn't just a luxury, it's the very proof of our existence, our actual purpose. Ultimately, it comes down to how many creators we can provide with that kind of freedom, and what they will do when they have it.

Itoi: The truth is we're never just given that luxury. But look, if you can't shrug off the risk and take a massive swing, you're never going to hit it into the stands. I've always loved the saying, "A cornered rat will bite the cat." If you live every day like a cornered rat, you naturally stop worrying about striking out.

If you've enjoyed reading this interview and would like to be able to vote each month on what I translate, please consider supporting me on Patreon! I can't do it without your help!