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The Making Of Super Mario 64 – full Giles Goddard interview (2001)

51 points gregsadetsky 1 day ago 13 comments

a1o 1 hour ago | parent

> How many people were on the Super Mario 64 team?

> Probably about 15 people in the end.

Whoa, a much smaller team than I imagined! It must have been fun working in this group!! The rest of the interview is also cool but was impressed with this small number!!

onlyrealcuzzo 8 minutes ago | parent

It's incredible how small the teams were on some of Nintendo's best games.

Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask were 40-50 people. If you look at the credits for modern games, they scroll for minutes at light speed. The entire credits are ~100 people on those games.

dfxm12 1 hour ago | parent

99% of the game is concerned with [Mario's movement]. most of Miyamoto’s time is spent on that, and the movement of the camera.

I had to put down too many early 3D action games because of clunky controls and not being able to see what was going on. Maybe horror games (like resident evil) could get away with awkward cameras in the service of jump scares, but it's frustrating when you have to make a jump and the camera, and thus the controls, don't cooperate with you.

a1o 53 minutes ago | parent

It’s been a little while, but I remember Mario 64 having way better camera than many games, even for a while

endemic 13 minutes ago | parent

The dedicated buttons to move the camera position were a revelation.

frou_dh 49 minutes ago | parent

In hindsight, the movement in the early Tomb Raider games was really awkward. It didn't feel very human... it felt like an endless loop of rotating a circular tray then putting your foot on the gas.

Keyframe 36 minutes ago | parent

Late Mark Haigh-Hutchinson wrote a great book about real time game cameras "Real Time Cameras: A Guide for Game Designers and Developers". Anyone interested in the topic ought to check it out.

AdmiralAsshat 13 minutes ago | parent

Miyamoto's talent has always been in his relentless technical execution and polish. Particularly with the move to 3D, every modern platformer and adventure game owes its basic camera and control to Mario 64. Every modern action game owes its lock-on system (the ability to target individual enemies and move/strafe in relation to the target) to the Z-targeting system from Zelda: OoT.

Aissen 55 minutes ago | parent

> What’s the secret behind that Mario ‘feel’?

> I think that is fine-tuning. Many, many, many hours and days spent actually sitting down and playing the game.

Turns out quality takes time. Who would have thought. Very few games reach this level of fine-tuning, because it takes dedication (and budget).

Funnily, it's almost conflicting with this answer:

> Was much changed during development?

> Apart from the number of polygons use, the characters were first-off – once they were designed, they went straight into the game. There wasn’t really a lot of changing, artists just kept supplying stuff that just got put in the game, conveyor-belt style. That was more or less because of a very, very tight deadline – it had to be out right when the N64 came out.

So it's more nuanced. You fine-tune the fundamentals, but not necessarily everything.

okeuro49 48 minutes ago | parent

If you are interested in Mario 64 have a look at Kaze Emanuar's YouTube channel.

https://youtube.com/channel/UCuvSqzfO_LV_QzHdmEj84SQ

From Wikipedia:

> Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.

pjmlp 30 minutes ago | parent

N64 and the Wii follow ups actually are one of the few consoles linage, that after the move to C/C++ SDKs, that actually has a quite visible OpenGL influence, including the shaders.

Due to its SGI influence.

HelloUsername 28 minutes ago | parent

The page from the magazine: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/3WVUtqH2om

cubefox 13 minutes ago | parent

One thing he doesn't mention explicitly is that someone working on Mario 64 invented modern third-person controls for games with free camera. Games, which started development before Mario 64 came out, had "tank controls" where the movement was relative to the direction the player character was facing.

In Super Mario 64 this was different: pressing "up" on the controller didn't let Mario walk forward from his own perspective; rather, it made him walk in the direction the camera was currently facing. Basically every third-person game today now uses the Mario 64 control scheme.

It is interesting that another game which had a similarly huge influence on character controls was also a Mario game: Super Mario Bros for the NES. It introduced character acceleration, dynamic jump length based on character speed, dynamic jump-height based on how long the jump button is held, and character steering in the air. Basically every 2D platformer uses this control scheme to this day. Games before that had fixed jump arcs and fixed running speed.