Galaxy Director Talks Story and Miyamoto

In an interview with Wired.com, the director for Super Mario Galaxy tells how he had as always pushed for a stronger storyline in previous Mario and Zelda titles even though Shigeru Miyamoto was against it.

“I would sort of try to find sneaky ways to get [story elements] in without them noticing too much,” Yoshiaki Koizumi said of his early work. “These are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn’t nearly as fond of, and occasionally didn’t like.”

Koizumi’s first job at Nintendo was created art as well as writing the manual for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Koizumi also came up with the island and dream story background for Link’s Awakening.

“EAD doesn’t tend to focus on the big story in most of their games. But I was the one coming up with scenarios, just on my own, ever since the time of Link’s Awakening,” Koizumi said. “But even at that time, I felt like I came up with this entire scenario and a backstory for Link, but nobody really seemed to care. They were always saying, let’s not try to push the story forward too much.”

During the interview Koizumi noted that Miyamoto was one of the first to come up with a narrative for a video game, Donkey Kong specifically, but after that game Miyamoto stepped away from story and delved deeper into game play.

To get more story in Mario Galaxy, Koizumi said that they came up with the children’s book idea which allowed players to view the story if they thought necessary are just continuing playing the game. Another topic Koizumi touched on in the interview is what it is like to work with Miyamoto.

One of this main points was that it was challenging just to figure out what Miyamoto wanted when developing a title.

“One of the things that makes Miyamoto’s feedback so hard to understand is that none of his sentences have subjects. So you have to rely on context to understand a statement. But more than that, Miyamoto may not know himself what he’s trying to say.

“Or he may be intentionally vague just to spur thought, just to give people a chance to come up with their own ideas and not limit them to the types of solutions they might be able to find.”

Check out the entire interview here.