Nintendo Wants to Make Their New Games More Like Their Old Games

The creator of "Mario" and "Zelda" has confessed.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo had an enlighting chat with Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Zelda and Mario and Nintendo's lead developer, at E3, and their discussion touched on old vs. new Nintendo games.

Particularly, Totilo asked him why newer Nintendo games can take such a long time to really get going—Skyward Sword, for example, takes over an hour just to get to the first dungeon.

"This is actually a topic that has been a big discussion internally for us lately," Miyamoto said. "I think there a couple of things going on. One is that, often times we're creating games where you're doing a lot of different actions. Zelda is an example of one of those.

"And, particularly with these types of games, you have to first learn the action and then you have to master the action and then you have to have more actions added in and master those. Then, when you have a lot of actions you can do all at once is when the game really becomes fun. And with a game like Zelda, on top of that, you have the story elements that also take additional time to tell.

"So one of the things we're talking about internally is how can we get people to that point of fun more quickly, and 'How do we balance the need to teach them how to do something with the need for them to be able to master it and feel they can do it well?'—and also tell the story—and 'What is that overall balance and how we approach it?' That's one of the key things we're talking about with Zelda right now."

He mentioned Super Mario World for the SNES as the first Mario game that he felt needed tutorials, and that things have escalated from there.

"Gradually, that type of tutorial sort of became rather commonplace and now we're starting to have these games where it is taking longer and longer to sort of get to that core fun," he said. "So that's precisely what we've been having discussions about."

Would you like Nintendo's games to draw more influence from their classic titles, or do you like the direction in which things have progressed? Tell us in the comments or on Twitter.

Latest in Pop Culture