Miyamoto Says it’s All About the Fun

Posted by Paul Hamilton Categories: Casual, Culture, Nintendo

Read More | Next Generation

Famed Nintendo creative mind Shigeru Miyamoto clarifies Nintendo’s stance on the difficulty of games. “...[T]here is no point in making a difficulty level the fun factor of a game. We are making Super Mario Galaxy as a new and fun experience which aims at providing a very appealing, convincing and—before all—fun experience,” he says. He continues, “Should [a game] be fun by only playing it a short time, this indicates already it has a big value as a product… It is very important that the full fun of the game is being felt in the first stage 1-1.”

Clearly Miyamoto and Nintendo are not afraid to paint even their most prized properties with their new inclusive brushes, but one can’t help wondering whether Mario would have grown into the iconic figure he is today without some of that old-fashioned controller-chucking frustration. Early Miyamoto/Mario games weren’t especially forgiving (witness Donkey Kong and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2, released in the states as “The Lost Levels”) and the familiar mascot did pretty well. It could even be argued that since the invention of the checkpoint, save game and narrative structure that encouraged completion rather than repetition, no game character has achieved the same level of popularity enjoyed by earlier avatars such as Pac-Man and of course Mario.

Still, Miyamoto makes a fairly compelling argument since, after all, games are supposed to be fun and most people don’t find frustration terribly engaging. Miyamoto cuts to the chase, “We need to release more games which feel like games. It is important that people who are playing them feel that the games are indeed fun to play.”