Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that, during development, Super Mario 64 became “boring”.
“All of a sudden it hit me,” explains Miyamoto. “I don’t remember if it was when I watched someone playing it, but I was like, ‘Wait, a minute…’ So I went around and asked everyone, ‘This game was really fun in the beginning, but now it doesn’t feel fun anymore, does it?’ And just as I’d expected, they all said, ‘We agree.'”
Miyamoto explains that Super Mario 64’s development had begun to lose its way due to a number of alterations to the way in which Mario moved: “Well, it was something really simple with Mario’s movement. In the beginning, we had Mario turning really slowly, so that it was really overemphasized. But at some point he’d started turning really quickly. He kind of zipped around.
“So then we changed it so that he went back to turning really slowly. And well, I’m not sure if that was the right change to make, but it was really important to me. Because Super Mario 64 was a project that started from that turning movement.”
[Thanks Official Nintendo Magazine]
Miyamoto discusses issues during Super Mario 64’s development
