– Shigeru Miyamoto, speaking in 1998 to an interviewer from Japanese magazine Game Hiryu.
It’s fitting that as Nintendo gears up to release Super Mario Maker this week, a freshly-translated 1998 Japanese interview with Mario maker Shigeru Miyamoto has surfaced over on Shmuplations that sheds light on how the veteran game designer believed game development should evolve to focus on making fun experiences, rather than extremely challenging or lengthy games.
Shmuplations (a site dedicated to translating and archiving interviews and other ephemera of the Japanese game industry) translated the interview from Game Hiryu, a Japanese game criticism magazine that folded in 2006.
Reading it now, developers may appreciate Miyamoto’s perspective on how game designers shouldn’t feel shackled to making games with the most “realistic depiction” afforded by technology, and how compelling games don’t necessarily need to be difficult or packed with content to keep players occupied.
“It really isn’t hard to stop using difficulty and content as the backbone of your game design. But because these are the things in which games have grown and developed thus far, I know it’s difficult for developers to let them go,” said Miyamoto roughly 17 years ago. “Yet we find ourselves at a juncture where, if those ideas are never challenged, then games cannot grow. For those who think deeply about such things, this is a real dilemma! And it’s been a big issue for us at Nintendo for awhile now, too.”
This is especially intriguing in light of the fact that many indie developers found success, years after this interview was published, in sidestepping the race for ever-increasing realism in games to focus on making unique, succinct (and to be fair, sometimes incredibly difficult) games.
You can read more of Miyamoto’s thoughts (circa 1998) on game design over on Shmuplations.