Super Mario Galaxy has proven to be both a critical and commercial success, catering to classic fans of the Super Mario Bros. series as well as brining in new converts thanks to the Nintendo Wii's casual-friendly ad campaigns. With an undeniable success under his belt, the restless director of Mario Galaxy, Yoshiaki Koizumi, gave us the opportunity to pick his brain about the work he and the team put into bringing Mario to the Wii.

What was your role in Super Mario Galaxy?
I worked as the game director on Super Mario Galaxy, which basically encompasses everything from the beginning stages of planning to the end of development. The game director is on-site during development, looking at the quality of every individual element and ultimately is going to be responsible for whether the game is fun or not. But I also created many of the individual elements of play as well as the storyline, the number of levels, that sort of thing.

I know you worked on Sunshine- being that the Wii was aimed at a much wider audience, what was it like developing for a different type of audience?
Certainly, the Wii seems to appeal more to people who don't usually play games much at all. But there are other factors at work here. The better way to think of the process and development between Sunshine and Galaxy is that I always studied the game that came before, to find out what sort of unneeded elements it had that may have changed the experience, where I could find ways to improve the tempo of gameplay. So it's hard to say that I did it this way just because it's a way audience, rather, it's an evolution over time.

Was the development natural, or did it take a lot of trial and error to get that mix of something that was comfortable to play and fun to play?
We're always asking ourselves the question, "What kind of Mario game do people want to play?" But we don't always know the answer -- there have been times that, more than trial and error, we just look back and try to take things from different lessons of development, even from other games, and try to implement them here. So for example, we want to recreate the tempo of the original Super Mario Bros. game - that fast and furious kind of feel, but now the game is in 3D, so how do we make sure the player doesn't get lost? As far as dealing with the fact that Galaxy may have differed from many people's expectations - people might say, "Oh, we never thought Mario would go to space," and all I can say is, "I'm sorry, now he's in space."

Were you looking to still capture that original feel and appeal of the classic Mario games?
A lot of Mario players seem to have similar expectations of play, and to a certain extent you really don't want to frustrate those expectations, because if they want to see Goombas in the game, then you really do have to give them Goombas in the game. But at the same time, you need to think about ways to adapt to your current game. For example, if you're going to be putting Goombas on planets in outer space, are they going to be all alien-looking or do you preserve their original appearance and cater a bit more to that sense of nostalgia? There are a lot of other things that you don't really know what to deal with. Are people going to start complaining about the fact that Mario is in an environment where there's no air for him to breathe? So you have to balance those two things, try to maintain a sense of wonder by showing people so many new things, but not frustrating so many of their expectations that they really get upset that it doesn't feel like a Mario game at all.

Continue...