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

Seeing as it’s Mario’s 25th birthday and all that, seems like a good time for this! This is the unpublished, unedited version of a 2001 interview with Nintendo coder Giles Goddard about the making of the N64’s Super Mario 64. Parts of this appeared in NGC magazine (that article is referenced on the Super Mario 64 Wikipedia page), but this much bigger version has lots of juicy behind-the-scenes ’90s-era Nintendo stuff that didn’t make it into the article. The notes are a bit rough. And the ‘questions’ are all guesses as to what I originally asked – for some reason I didn’t keep a record of what I actually asked at the time. Fool! What was your official job title? I can’t remember what my official title was, but I think I was front-end programmer or something like that. I basically just did the Mario face. It was supposed to be something like it was loading – even though it wasn’t on CD there was still lots of stuff going on in the background, sorting itself out. How many people were on the Super Mario 64 team? Probably about 15 people in the end. Probably not as many as people think. But then again there was some other people doing stuff behind the scenes. Compared with Zelda [Ocarina Of Time], it was a very small team. What was the Nintendo office like? It was an open-plan office, but everybody had their own little cubicle. Depending on what projects they’re working on, they shift around. It is all open plan, in as much as you have rows of people sitting there working. But then where’s there a project going on, the core team would basically grab hold of these programmers and artists around them, and you’d get the Super Mario group expanding outwards from the centre. I think at that time the artists and the programmers were actually separated out, so you had an artist group and a programmer group. I was actually right behind the Mario programmers team who were working with SGI on the N64 APIs and stuff. That part was quite small, so you could stand up and shout at someone who was working on Wave Race just away from someone working on Mario 64. Quite a good little set-up. Was it a bustling office? No talking! Particularly in Japanese companies, it’s very very quiet. Occasionally you’d get little groups of programmers or artists getting together for a chat, and somebody higher up would walk over and give them the eye, and they’d sit down and shut up. It’s nothing like English or US companies. What kickstarted the Super Mario 64 project? Well, obviously it was the first game, another Mario game was the most obvious game to do. It started way before there was any hardware, it started on these Onyx emulators, the old SGI Onyx. They had an N64 emulator, the first thing we got from SGI. It was an emulation of the API, not the hardware. At that time, Nishida-san – main programmer who started the entire project off – he was working on a GL and this emulator. The emulator was quite close to the GL, so he had these little Mario characters running around on the Onyx, or API Indys later. What role did Miyamoto play? There was only 3 or 4 projects going on at EAD by that time, he was in charge of all of them. Three of those weren’t high priority, so he was 100% Mario 64, he was always there. Sitting down with a machine and playing with the various demos. One of the things he loved doing was just playing down with experiments. That’s the way the Mario face came about. At the time, I was thinking of things to make that would show off what N64 could do. One of the things was real-time vertex calculations. In games, you usually have a fixed set of vertices that you simply move around in a matrix – you just move a shape around. We wanted to move around individual points, morph it. No games used it at the time, we didn’t know what to call it, so I named it meshes or something like that. I was playing around with this thing with a GL program on the Indy, playing around with this Mario face with an Indy cam, a cam you get with Indy – two ping-pong balls for a face. Miyamoto said: can you make a Mario face out of that for the N64? It was one of the first games that let you play around before you’d even started – and I don’t think it was written anywhere in the manual that you could actually play around with Mario’s face. Another Nintendo secret! So did Miyamoto start with Mario running around on his screen? Usually that’s the first thing to go in, some kind of map system where the characters can figure out what height they are, the camera can figure out what it can see and how much it can see, figure out how to split up the scenery so it only draws as much as it needs to draw. That was the first thing, we were just playing around with Mario. He was wandering around a simple grid to start with, just picking stuff up, dropping stuff. The animation was quite central to what he was doing. A lot of the animation was actually in there before any of the game. The Mario that Miyamoto had running around basically looked as he did in the final version. The camera system was revolutionary for the time. One of the reasons for that was the Miyamoto didn’t know how to extend the Super Mario Bros from the SNES. Wasn’t really sure how to give that same sort of Mario Bros feeling in 3D. Quite a few months were spent around just playing around with different camera views, animations, ways of looking at the map. At some point, the game had a fixed path, almost like an isometric type of look. That didn’t represent that much of a jump from the original 2D Mario. There was a lot of criticism of the camera originally. At the time, Miyamoto thought the camera was really good – the way it tried to avoid the scenery. It was very well done – it was done by [Takumi] Kawagoe, who worked on Starfox 2 for the SNES, which got canned. He was a very very good programmer. I think his only job was the camera, so quite a major thing to do. He was there on the entire project – the whole time. Your name is on some Nintendo patents. There was a lot of stuff being patented. I think I had my name on one of them – something like 1080 or something like that, where you draw the background with a cube, rather than have a simple flat background. That was fair enough. SGI had a demo for GL a few years before that, I came up with a way of drawing bitmap information and colour information – so rather than just having a static view, you could rotate the camera around, you could also move objects into the background and they’d put themselves behind the other objects. I think they used it on Zelda [Ocarina Of Time]. So they patented it! Half the patents that come out have been techniques that people have been using for years. The software patents just don’t work. This was about the time that Sega patented using different 3D camera views in games. So, suddenly, halfway through the Super Mario 64 project, one of the people from downstairs came up and said you realise Sega has the patent on being able to switch cameras. Jaws dropped. We investigated whether we could use them and whether anything would happen. But there was also a patent on putting a 3D object on a bitmapped plane from a coin-op about 15-20 years ago. [Asked something about Bowser levels] The 2D Bowser levels weren’t really a result of that. I would imagine it mainly came about because you had a boss there, there’s a lot of Mario maps you can take various routes to get to the end, whereas this one you’ve gotta have a fixed route going on. You know where you stand – you know you can’t run off into a corner and find another exit. It might be nice to do that, but you’ve gotta meet that boss! How quickly did the maps come together? The 3D worlds formed quite quickly. Bob-Omb’s Battlefield was the first map developed. It can’t have been more than 6-7 months before it was ready and working, with enemies running around the map. At that time, NCL hadn’t done a 3D game before, so no-one really knew what they were doing, to be honest. The artists didn’t really know how they should turn their Softimage objects into objects into the game. There was a lot of experimenting, a lot of improvisation going on. It was quite difficult to pinpoint when, where and how much Mario came into being. Were you able to play with the N64 controller from the start? The original Mario was running around with the keyboard, on the Onyx server. We had no controllers for six months, we had a simple serial port on the back of the emulator boards. The entire game was done with these Indy emulator boards, hardware boards basically emulating the N64. These serial ports – we plugged modified Sega controllers in – most of us were using these modified Sega joypads. We had various prototypes – there were lots of them, probably at least 100 prototypes, mostly based around the central stick, how that moved, how well it moved, what shape the thing around it should be – it ended up seven-sided, but we tried many, circles etc. Was Mario 64 designed around the controller? The first time Miyamoto played with the controller, because he’s working most of the time on Mario 64, he would have seen Mario 64 with it. It wasn’t so much that controller dictated Mario 64, it was just that was the game he was working on. Mario was the way of testing it out. Probably more the other way around. The actual movement of Mario came from the N64 controller, the way you move the central stick. There was a lot of thought about how the camera moved with the yellow buttons – I don’t think Miyamoto even liked them. I remember talking to him a couple of years ago, he said it’d have been better to have two D-pads, it would’ve been a better balance to have the same on the left and the right. How much thought went into Mario’s movement?