Shigeru Miyamoto x Kenji Eno (1996)

Eno: Hey, it's been a long time.

Miyamoto: It has been a long time.

Eno: How have things been lately?

Miyamoto: I've finally caught my breath. I'm actually thinking about taking some time off to go on a family trip.

Eno: In my case, even when I call it a "family trip," it always ends up turning into work. I suggested going to Romania, and my wife just flat-out refused. She said, "That's just for work, isn't it?" (laughs)

Miyamoto: It's the same at my house. They tell me they hate being dragged around. (laughs)

Eno: To jump right into the thick of things today, the truth is I actually haven't beaten Mario 64 yet. I love the Mario series. I used to leave my Famicom turned on for so long playing Super Mario Bros. 3 that the console would overheat. But I just haven't been able to get into Mario 64. My wife won't play it either. I kept wondering why that was, but when I first tried Mario 64 at the Shoshinkai show, I felt this incredible sense of freedom in its world. You could get carried away by a bird, run through a field of flowers and be startled by butterflies, plunge down a waterfall, or fly through the sky. It felt like you could just mess around aimlessly, and anyone who wanted to dive deeper could master it.

But with the final retail version, I felt like I had suddenly joined a really strict after-school sports club. I found myself unable to get into the mindset of meticulously reading every signpost or trying to collect dozens of stars. To me, Mario 64 was supposed to be about a very loose, free atmosphere. When I first saw Super Mario Bros., it blew my mind. There was this mustachioed middle-aged guy, pipes, mountains, sky, ground, and blocks. I was a Namco fan who preferred Pac-Man, so it was completely unexpected.

But on the N64, Princess Peach and Bowser have become so realistic, and her getting kidnapped and needing help feels so real that I can't just relax and enjoy it. It's like a yonkoma (four-panel comic) strip suddenly turned into a gritty graphic novel. I always thought of you, Miyamoto-san, as someone who draws a lot of high-quality four-panel comics. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

Miyamoto: That's a tough one. What you're saying is that the boundary between Mario and Zelda has started to disappear. That happened because we were planning Mario and Zelda at the same time. We decided to finish Mario first, and my own personal habits and quirks just bled right into it. It was something I was very conflicted about. In the end, we moved away from having a specific vision of what we wanted to create; it became a matter of wanting to jam in every single idea that seemed interesting. And when you look at what makes the N64 interesting, it's that realistic 3D presentation. In trying to create a coherent, unbroken 3D world within that space, we inevitably ended up with parts of the game that left less room for free, open-ended play.

In an ideal world, I'd want to make things more lighthearted and open. So you're right, the Shoshinkai version held more potential in that regard. However, I believe the retail version has a better level of polish. After all, there are also players who want a proper sense of tension alongside a moderate amount of freedom. I’ve got both of those sides in me: the urge to just play freely, and the desire for actual tension.

And while I'm not carrying the cross of Nintendo on my back, I am conscious of the need to reach a larger audience than before. So I completely understand what you're saying, but if we made the game that was too extreme in either direction, there's no guarantee we would mobilize millions of people. I think it's great in terms of future potential, but a game like Aquanaut's Holiday, for example, has high ambitions but falls short as a commercial product.

Now, if you ask whether Nintendo should be satisfied as long as the commercial polish is high, I don't think so either. There are two kinds of games--well-made games and interesting games--and the public perception of Nintendo's games has gradually shifted from "interesting" to "well-made." We've ended up pouring a lot of our energy into that side of things. By completing Mario 64, we've proven we can make a solid 3D action game. Because of that, I think we can aim for something more interesting next time.

Great Expectations: Interactivity and Depth

Eno: I always felt your work, Miyamoto, was characterized by providing all sorts of different responses to the various actions of the player. That's why, for instance, when a clam attacks you underwater, I expected the presentation to be totally unique compared to any other game. I gladly ran straight into the clam, purposely crashed into walls, and threw myself off ledges. But in Mario 64 I just took standard damage every time. To be honest, it made me go, "Huh?" I had this expectation you would create something even deeper than Aquanaut's Holiday. Like, fish are swimming around without you realizing it, and when you touch a different fish on a whim, a new form of life is born. Something where you initially just enjoy the basic interactive elements, but as you dig deeper, you find real depth underneath. I feel like it would be great to have a game with that kind of longevity. I just didn't feel that in this Mario.

Miyamoto: Maybe that's something you or Kazutoshi Iida should work hard on? (laughs) I'm sure we'll start seeing that kind of thing from here on. Video games are finally breaking out of the framework established by the arcades, and a new framework unique to home consoles is being born. People ask me a lot about what we can achieve with the N64 Disk System, but games where the entire situation changes dynamically in real time are difficult to pull off right now. So when you ask what Mario 64 managed to demonstrate within those limitations, it's that Mario can move freely in a 3D space. We believe that simply being able to move around a 3D environment exactly as you want is already a sufficiently fun and novel experience. However, the kind of theatrical presentation you've described isn't quite there yet.

The Camera in Mario 64 Explains Too Much

Eno: It's a difficult balance. Personally, I think the camera in Mario 64 is incredibly excellent. Since I also run a CG studio, I like to think I have my own methodology when it comes to camera placement. In that sense, Mario 64 strikes me as a well-crafted, smooth-scrolling soccer game. But the only thing that bothers me is the camera positioning when you fling an enemy or clear a stage. The camera stays fixed in the exact same position you were in while fighting the boss, or once you defeat them, it goes out of its way to track the enemy. It makes the staging feel a bit clunky.

In comics, there's a technique of omission--like if someone pinches a woman's butt, the next panel skips straight to her saying "What do you think you're doing, you creep!" with a slap mark left on his cheek. When you throw Bowser and he goes boom, I think it would be more interesting presentation-wise if the camera didn't show the enemy falling at all, and instead just showed the smoke rising.

Miyamoto: Thank you. Yeah, you're right. That makes a lot of sense. Originally, I had no intention of showing things like where the Star appears, but we felt that if we didn't show it, players would find it too confusing. So we forced ourselves to come up with a way to display it within the current system. No, please keep giving me feedback like this. It's very helpful.

Eno: Man, I want to join the Mario team and make a Mario game myself. (laughs)

Miyamoto: Why don't you? (laughs) You praise the camera quite a bit, but we get a lot of users saying it moves around chaotically on its own and makes the game hard to play, or that they could design a better camera themselves. It turns out people who know absolutely nothing about 3D are the ones who tell me the camera is interesting, so I'm glad for that at least.

Eno: Doing what you did is absolutely impossible for anyone else. I've studied camera positioning extensively myself. When I saw Mario 64 at Shoshinkai, I thought, "Wow, they've really got something here." I was astonished that a talented group of people could come up with such a magnificent answer to the problem of the camera.

Capturing New Customers with Every Game

Miyamoto: What was the catalyst that made you create D, by the way?

Eno: I felt a real danger that games were becoming too niche and catering only to maniacs. People might say, "What difference can a single creator make?" but an individual creator actually carries a lot of weight. I felt a strong responsibility to expand gaming to a more general audience. At the time, if you pitched a concept that wasn't a licensed character game, a sequel, or a port, you'd get turned down everywhere you went. I thought it would be nice to have games that felt more like watching a movie. I used to make action games back in the Famicom days too, you know.

Miyamoto: So I've heard. It's not that I want people to just make standard action games or shoot-'em-ups for the N64, but there are very few creators who are willing to seriously tackle an N64 action game. All the veterans have migrated over to RPGs. For our part, we don't want to just cater to hardcore gamers; we want to capture new customers every single time.

Since my background is originally in industrial design, I view the Rubik's Cube as my eternal rival. There's a kind of product that's very important to me. It's not stuff made by veteran craftsmen who have spent years building computer games specifically for gamers, but rather things that make people realize, "Wow, computer games can do that...?!" Making products that surprise non-gamers, that is our big challenge. That said, when people point out that we do nothing but make sequels, they're entirely right. (laughs) I want to hurry up and reach a point where we can leave the franchise titles to the younger staff, while the older folks just do whatever they feel like. (laughs)

Eno: Action games are tough. There are so many invisible elements. Actually, there's one thing I want to demystify today. Take the jump in 2D Mario games. Other companies' Mario-like games usually have you jump along a fixed trajectory or a simple quadratic curve. But with Mario's jump, if you hold the A button down past a certain duration, it feels like you get a slight extra bit of distance at the very end, almost like a special bonus. It feels as if a separate jumping equation kicks in and pushes Mario horizontally.

Miyamoto: We don't actually do that. What happens is that the moment you release the button, we increase the gravity slightly. Because of that, the trajectory feels different depending on whether you hold the A button to the very end or let go halfway through. You're looking at it very closely, though.

Eno: Years ago, when I was making a certain game, I set a goal to create a jump that felt even better than Mario's, and I thought about it with absolute seriousness. I was incredibly obsessed with the exact nuance of whether you could barely land on a certain block or not. My programmer and I spent about a month working on nothing but the jumping equations, and before we knew it, it ended up consuming an absurd amount of memory. (laughs)

Miyamoto: There really are people out there who think things through to that level. It's funny how we can sit here and talk about thread-the-needle programming tricks while simultaneously discussing the future of gaming in a way that feels like trying to grab a cloud.

Eno: When the 3D Stick came along, I thought the ideal of the "B-Dash", which you invented in Super Mario Bros., had finally been fully realized.

Miyamoto: I'm still torn on that one, actually. I like how holding down a button gives you that physical sensation of exerting effort. We tested both configurations, but the N64 controller is already large, and we have to remember that small children play it too. There's also a certain sense of guilt that comes with forcing players to press two buttons simultaneously, so we removed the hold-button-to-dash option entirely. I'm still thinking about various approaches for the future. The tactile sensation is completely different when you're putting physical strength into both hands versus just one.

Eno: I have a personal theory as to why people don't get deeply absorbed in PC games. When you use a mouse, one of your hands is completely idle. I think that's why people don't get as fully invested.

Miyamoto: We put a tremendous amount of thought into even the simplest detail of how you grip the controller. Those kinds of physiological factors play a huge role in our game design.

Something Simple and Construction-Based

Eno: I'd love for you to make just one loose, off-the-cuff game, Miyamoto. Something without scores or stages.

Miyamoto: Yoshi's Island used that 100-point perfectionist system, right? The development staff did that because they loved it, but I don't actually like that approach very much. Still, when I see players getting completely hooked on it, there's a part of me that concedes and thinks, "Well, I guess this works too." It's not that we are shackled by the preferences of our audience, but we are quite earnest. We diligently build things up piece by piece and gather user feedback.

Eno: You should cause a little mischief every now and then. (laughs)

Miyamoto: Well, our roots lie in wanting to surprise people, after all.

Eno: I recently played Excitebike on the Famicom at the office. It's so incredibly well-made. The fact that you can design your own custom tracks and everything.

Miyamoto: Lately, I've been wanting to do a game with some kind of casual construction or level editing. Something where you can edit things easily just by messing around with it casually.

Eno: I think it's great when the construction happens naturally as the user plays. Not a game where you actively raise a fish, but rather something where your actions cause a fish to grow as a byproduct. You look back and realize you've built something.

Another thing I wanted to ask you about is software pricing. I can understand someone being willing to drop 20,000 yen for Mario 64, but from a creator's perspective, selling a game for 9,800 yen really hurts my soul. I suppose things will be fine once the Disk System drops, though.

Miyamoto: We understand that completely. To us, 6,000 yen is the right ballpark for a toy. If I were at a small, struggling software house and just wanted to try selling whatever I thought was fun, I know it would be brutal to produce it on a 9,800 yen Nintendo cartridge. In that light, pivoting to CD-ROM is a natural conclusion. But the reality is, the games we want to make simply cannot be built without a cartridge. It's the exact same logic as Hironobu Sakaguchi saying Final Fantasy VII can't be made without a CD-ROM, so it can't be helped.

As for what happens from here on, it's a question of whether we will utilize even larger capacity cartridges, or if we can suppress the cartridge retail price by driving down the cost of the chips. That's why the Disk System is coming out next. For titles that don't strictly require a cartridge, we intend to make them on disks, which will allow us to lower the price.

Eno: CD-ROM games have a nice quality where you can make them with a certain degree of carelessness. Personally, I feel like gaming has only truly begun now that we have entered the 3D era. It feels like the music has finally started, like we can finally start a band. I say this a lot, but I want to make a game where a city appears on screen with a massive skyscraper, you can rotate it around in 3D, and your only goal is to destroy it with a bomb. You calculate the wind speed, meticulously plant the bomb, and when you hit the A button, the building goes crashing down. You get paid based on how little collateral damage you caused. I want to make something loose and casual like that.

Miyamoto: That reality is just around the corner. That's why we need to hurry up and get the Disk System out, and diligently keep pushing forward with Mario and Zelda until that kind of market is firmly established.

Please Make Zelda Like a Yonkoma (4-panel) Comic

Eno: The N64 Zelda is going to turn out very "Zelda-like," I imagine. With a bit of Mario mixed in.

Miyamoto: Yeah. Though I do think it will turn out much more emotional.

Eno: This might sound incredibly rude, but if you are planning to draw a gritty graphic novel with Zelda, I really wish you would release it as a four-panel comic instead. I read an interview where you said that for the previous Zelda game, you originally wanted it so that if you set grass on fire, it would spark a wildfire and burn everything down, or if you pulled a plug, the whole world would flood. There are very few people who can construct a massive world, establish the rules for that world, and make a game where you take responsibility for your actions within it. It made me realize once again how incredible you are. There are so few creators on that side of the fence right now.

I honestly thought Mario 64 would have elements like that--like if Mario skidded to a stop on the snow, particles of snow would roll forward and eventually accumulate into a massive snowball if you looked closely. I figured there would be tons of those natural elements, rules, and conditions that couldn't be written out explicitly.

Miyamoto: I would love to do that. However, strategy guides exist now, so the joy of someone discovering something entirely on their own doesn't really translate anymore. Everyone expects to be able to beat the game as a given. There's a massive dilemma there.

Eno: That's exactly the kind of game I want to make right now. One where there are AI-driven characters, and if you become close friends with them, they might build a cannon for you. That's what I mean by construction happening before you even realize it.

Costs, Costs, Costs

Miyamoto: In reality, instead of having six or seven stars per stage, I only wanted half that number. But like I said before, the foundation is set now, so we perhaps can start doing stuff like that from here on out. Do you remember that old Mac game where you'd shoot cannons at each other in a windy area? You'd adjust nothing but the launch angle and power to hit the enemy artillery hiding behind rocks. The other side would shoot back at you using the wind too. I think that kind of thing is far more interesting than the RPGs we see today.

But you just can't make a game like that when you have to worry about justifying a 9,800 yen price tag. People look at a casual game like that and assume it can be made on a low budget, or that a rookie can handle it, or that if it's that simple, it could just be distributed via the Satellaview. Everything gets manufactured based entirely on price. Instead of opening up a playground for people to try out new ideas, everything has just become a conversation about cost. I find that a bit frustrating. If only we had properly sold the Famicom Disk System back then, it really would have expanded things and allowed for all kinds of experimental challenges. The CD-ROM has shown some of that potential, but the limitations with loading data from the CD to the memory makes it pretty hard to build something with the degree of freedom we'd like.

Eno: CD-ROM machines all suffer from a lack of RAM. The M2 is nice, though. It's not that I'm with them out of pure love; it feels more like I've been caught by a bad woman. I'm just the type of person who finds it hard to walk away halfway through. (laughs)

Miyamoto: Everyone talks about the PlayStation right now, but we are trying to do something entirely different with the N64, so in that sense, we don't worry about it too much. However, looking at games like D, I do think about the necessity of full-motion video. People bring it up to me a lot lately. I have no desire to get into filmmaking myself, but I do wonder whether Nintendo needs to become an organization capable of producing video content. If that time comes, we will need people to manage that kind of pipeline. That's the sense in which it concerns me.

Eno: Personally, I don't think video clips are all that necessary. But the problem is that players are so used to games by now that people feel they need those movies just to sell the world and get everyone excited.

Miyamoto: With hardware as powerful as the N64, you can move things interactively that come quite close to that, even if it doesn't go quite as far as D. But the Disk System should make that fully feasible. I think interactive movies will be more than enough. I don't see a future for mainstream games where a massive team slaves over a piece of CG just for the player to watch it once and then be completely done with it. That just inflates production costs and breeds a blockbuster mentality. And it makes it harder and harder to create those loose, off-the-cuff things like that building demolition game.

Wave Race Will Be Standard, Yet Fresh

Eno: What's coming out next for the N64?

Miyamoto: Wave Race. It's pretty much finished.

Eno: What was the reason that the F-Zero-like game we saw at Shoshinkai turned into a watercraft game?

Miyamoto: During development, we realized we wanted to do something that felt more like actual water, something that could only be achieved with water mechanics. So we split what was originally a single project into two separate games: Wave Race and F-Zero. The other factor was purely technical. If we don't have polygons flying across the screen at breakneck speeds, people are going to be disappointed by F-Zero. So we decided to build F-Zero with a much more cutting-edge system. You can't really get a sense of weight out of hardware until you've spent some time working with it. What we are capable of achieving is rising by the day right now, so we are building F-Zero to match that trajectory.

Eno: Is Wave Race fun?

Miyamoto: I think it's fun. It's straightforward, but there's no question it's a new experience. Even though people will say it's no longer F-Zero, I hope a bit of that F-Zero flavor still shines through.

Eno: F-Zero is a wonderfully crafted game. Speaking of driving games, I actually prefer Virtua Racing over things like Daytona USA or Sega Rally.

Miyamoto: That's interesting. Usually, the people who champion Virtua Racing tend to praise Daytona too.

Eno: I actually heard this directly from Yu Suzuki: there is a specific version of Virtua Racing that he considers the absolute best. However, it completely ignores the arcade reality of needing to be playable by anyone within two or three minutes. But apparently, that version is the best one. It functions incredibly well as a pure simulator.

Miyamoto: I suspect that if you put the absolute "best" version in front of a focus group, it would get completely torn to shreds for being far too difficult. Simulators are almost always difficult. At Nintendo we don't make simulators; we make games that are accessible to beginners but reveal more flavor the more you chew on them. My worry is that while we are busy doing that, we will inevitably lose the sensibility required to build a true simulator.

Eno: It's a tough dilemma.

Miyamoto: Sometimes it takes a real act of courage to restrain staff members who want to keep polishing and deepening mechanics, and tell them to fix it so that a beginner can play it too.

Eno: In that sense, has Wave Race turned into a great game with challenging controls?

Miyamoto: The more you play it, the more depth you find, but it's also designed so you can pick it up and play casually. The movement of the waves will cause lap times to vary, and simply changing the wind parameters alters the entire flow of a race. We are betting on the idea that it will provide a sensation you simply can't experience on a standard road surface. We aren't quite there yet, but real-time CG machines will undoubtedly be a certainty ten years from now.

Eno: Right now we're in a transitional phase. We had the Famicom, and this hardware is a stepping stone on the way to whatever comes next.

Miyamoto: Exactly. I don't feel any sort of inferiority complex toward movies whatsoever; I view them as an entirely separate medium. But if there is one thing we can't compete with, it's the fact that games age so quickly, and something five years old now looks terribly out of date. But things have gotten much better recently. I think we've finally reached a point where we can build things where the content will hold up, even if the underlying technology becomes dated.

Don't Sacrifice Your Family for Games!

Eno: The reason I find games so fascinating is that other mediums usually start out artistic, then business bleeds into them until the art turns into a mere product. Industrial manufacturing takes over, marketing becomes the priority, and the medium declines. With games, people have only recently started talking about authorship and individual creative voice. It feels completely reversed. And it's not just me: you have folks like Yoot Saito, Kazutoshi Iida, and Yuji Naka from Nights into Dreams coming up. I'm incredibly happy about that shift.

Eno: Do your kids play games?

Miyamoto: Not very much. They're currently in the fifth and third grades. They're still playing EarthBound right now. I tell them they need to finish it already. (laughs) They're at that age where they're just growing so fast, so I'm sure there are plenty of better things for them to be doing right now than playing games.

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