Takashi Tezuka (Osaka, 1960) was there when he designed and launched the first Mario and Zelda games in the 1980s. Since then, he has produced or overseen nearly every entry in these series, perhaps focusing more on 2D games. That’s why when we met up with Nintendo’s legendary producer at Gamescom after playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, we asked him about ways old and new.
“So first of all thank you for noticing this,” Mr. Tezuka begins around the 2:30 mark in the video, as we recall when asked how many good ‘ol’ pens and squares of paper there are in this game his origin. As you mentioned, we used to design these courses with pen and paper, but of course we don’t do that anymore! (laugh). So now we’ve developed a specific tool for this, so level designers can use this tool to design their courses. So level design doesn’t mean we just put certain given elements and items into the course.”
“We also need to think about elements like enemies and gimmicks and how those will function throughout the course.
“So these level designers need to work with programmers, sound creators and other designers,” the Japanese producer continued. “Obviously, past Mario classes also had some tricks up their sleeves, in the sense that certain things were predetermined. So we also went through those fixed points, but we also had a lot of different types of classes, so we needed to think about different ideas to create these courses. This is one of the most challenging aspects.
We then compared the quirks and variety of the Super Mario Bros. Wonder update to what users can create using Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2.
“I think when we first launched Super Mario Maker, some people might have thought that this was the pinnacle, or that this was all we needed for 2D Mario,” when asked if Wonder was intentionally designed to be more When asked about something more complicated or crazier, Mr. Tezuka replied that it was really impossible to create anything more with Super Mario Maker. “Don’t worry, we can put a lot of ideas into 2D Mario and we can create new things! (laughs). Now we are finally able to launch this new type of 2D Mario and we are very excited to do so.
In the full video, there are many other Mario topics discussed with Mr. Tezuka and director Shiro Mori, including but not limited to difficulty, animations, and its new online mode. In fact, the last question has Nintendo’s producers reflecting on the platformer genre and how it has evolved since the days of the original Famicom with the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka himself and others.
