Exclusive Interview: Nintendo's Takashi Tezuka

June 22, 2006 | By: James Brightman

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We had the pleasure of meeting at E3 with Shigeru Miyamoto's right-hand man, Takashi Tezuka (right), who is the General Manager of the EAD Software Designing Department in Japan. Mr. Tezuka reveals that he'd like to work on an all-new 3-D Mario for DS, he talks about the Wii, and shares some interesting stories about Zelda. This is a must read!

GameDaily BIZ: You've been working alongside Mr. Miyamoto for a very long time. Do you two often bounce a lot of ideas off one another when designing games, or how does that relationship work?

Takashi Tezuka: Yes, that's exactly right; you've hit it on the head there. If I'm producing a game and Mr. Miyamoto will kind of float in and bounce ideas off of us and give us some advice on what he's seeing from an outside perspective and I'll do the same when he's producing a game. I'll kind of run in every once in a while and take a look and throw my ideas at the guys as well.

On the [organizational] chart of course Mr. Miyamoto is above me and I'm below him, so let's make sure that's clear [laughs].

BIZ: Mr. Miyamoto has become a legend with Nintendo fans and gamers in general. Would you ever want to have that kind of fame or do you prefer to be a bit more behind-the-scenes?

TT: [Laughs] No, that's too much work. I'd rather just be back in the shadows.

BIZ: When Nintendo was discussing what to name its new console, did you personally have any input into the final decision to call it Wii? And were you at all surprised by the reaction the name got in the West?

TT: There was a naming committee at NCL (Nintendo); however, I was not on that naming committee, so I really had no input into that decision making process. As far as when the name was announced and the reaction in the West—Europe and North America—knowing what the word means because someone told you and knowing because you grew up knowing that is just completely different. So even having been told what some of the negative aspects were of the name and what some people were saying, it really just doesn't hit home.

BIZ: During the Nintendo media briefing, Nintendo of America's Reggie Fils-Aime said that Twilight Princess is the "best Zelda ever made." If that's true, that's quite a statement. Do you agree with Reggie's assessment?

TT: Well, I think everybody's going to have a different opinion depending on what you're looking at when you play... there are a lot of different factors that will influence or impact that decision. I think this is a game that [the team] has taken a lot of pain and a lot of care to make, and that's definitely evident from beginning to end that you can see the amount of work and detail that's been put into the project... Even to the point where I'm [sometimes] surprised and will go, "Who's responsible for this amount of detail, for this one section?" This is amazing even to me.

BIZ: Has there been one franchise that you've enjoyed working on at Nintendo more than any other during your tenure at Nintendo?

TT: One of the very first things I did at Nintendo was work on the first Mario stuff, so I would definitely say Mario. Any Mario games are ones that are most memorable to me.

BIZ: Speaking of Mario, when the DS first launched one of the games that helped sell the initial units was Mario 64. Was there any thought of following that up with another all-new 3-D Mario for the DS, as opposed to the New Super Mario Bros. game? Or was New Super Mario Bros. in the works all along anyway?

TT: Yes, the 2-D New Super Mario Bros. had been in the works planning-wise all along. Actually when we were preparing Super Mario 64 for the DS, some of the characters in that we decided would already be carried over into the new 2-D platformer; so as early as that [the team] was already working on New Super Mario Bros.. And so they just started pulling assets together, different characters and materials, and basically over the development period for New Super Mario Bros. they just threw it all together and that's what the game is.

BIZ: Is Nintendo looking to do another 3-D Mario on DS, though?

TT: Well I'd love to! [laughs] I can't say anything more than that.

BIZ: How challenging has it been for Nintendo to come up with intuitive control schemes for the Wii games? It seems to me that something like a shooter—for example, Metroid Prime 3—would be a lot easier to design for than a platformer like Super Mario Galaxy. Is this something the team had to struggle with?

TT: Well first of all, let me say that the team working on Galaxy this time is filled with a bunch of innovators within NCL and they're a group that likes to try new things. They just did a ton of different experiments using the [Wii] controller interface. And then what they did amongst the many, many different types of Mario controls that the team came up with... they just kept paring it down, paring it down to the controls that you were seeing on the floor today [at the Wii booth], which is intuitive and simple, yet provide maximum ease of play for any gamer. Again, they pared it down and just kept whittling away until they came away with that. So this boiling away process was maybe the biggest challenge in that they had so many ideas and had to pare it down to what we have now.

So for example the quick rotation of the Wii remote that makes Mario spin, and with the pointing device just click anywhere on the screen and Mario goes; the automatic movement is just so intuitive and so simple are some of the examples that the team came up with. And so using those controls they did a lot of their level building and game design based on what you could do that was simple and intuitive with the controller.