Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

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DRW
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Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by DRW »

I stumbled upon this article where Shigeru Miyamoto talks about Luigi:
"There's something I've been meaning to share with somebody," Miyamoto says with a grin, letting us in on a secret of the development of the original Mario Bros. "One of those constraints was that because of memory limitations, the second character had to be identical to the first character in appearance. And so we looked at that and said, 'Well even if we have the same character, we could potentially change the color of the character.' But again we were limited in the color palettes – we didn't have much in the way of additional colors that we could use. And so we looked at the turtles in that game. Their heads are sort of skin-toned, their shells are green, so what we could do is we could use the color palette from the turtle on this character. And so from those technical limitations we said 'Okay. We have these two characters. They look the same, other than the fact that their colors are different. Obviously they must be twins.' From there, we decided, 'Okay, they're twins and this other character [Luigi] must be the younger brother.'"
Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/pic ... en-0338921

And now I have to ask: What the fuck is this guy talking about? Luigi is green because he shares the palette with the turtles? That's total bullshit, isn't it.

The turtles/shellcreepers in "Mario Bros." don't have the same skin color as Luigi:
http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/arcade/00/mariobros.html

Also, aside from green (and maybe white), they don't share any color with Luigi. His hair, his shoes, his shirt: Those are all individual colors.

So, why does Miyamoto say something that's obviously completely false?

I mean, I always thought that he talks a lot of nonsense:

Mario wears a hat because they didn't know how to animate the hair. Yeah, as if two pixel lines of short hair of a man need to be animated.

Or this one video where they talked as if Mario riding a cloud from "Super Mario Maker" was based on an old design document from the times of "Super Mario Bros. 1". Something like "After 30 years, this feature was finally implemented." Only that this very feature was already implemented in 1991 in "Super Mario World", so it's nothing new.

And now this: Luigi is green because he shares the palette with the shellcreeper. Except he doesn't. Or am I missing something here? I mean, isn't this an objectively wrong fact? Something that, unlike the hat story, can be proven not be true?

So, my questions:

1. Am I missing something? Does Luigi share a palette with the shellcreepers in "Mario Bros."?

2. If not, then why does Miyamoto make things like this up? He might be the greatest game designer of all time. But when it comes to things of the past, it looks like this guy cannot be truted about anything.
Last edited by DRW on Mon Oct 31, 2016 7:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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koitsu
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by koitsu »

*gets popcorn*
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Kasumi
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by Kasumi »

The screenshots you have posted are from the arcade version. Here is the NES/Famicom version:
Image
Given the close release of the two version (arcade/famicom), they were likely developed concurrently.
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by tokumaru »

DRW wrote:Does Luigi share a palette with the shellcreepers in "Mario Bros."?
I don't know anything about the hardware on which the original version of the game runs, so I don't know anything about the bit-depth or the color count of the machine, but I guess it's possible that the palette in question contains all of Luigi's colors along with all of the Shellcreepers' colors, but only green, blue and white happen to be shared between the sprites. Debugging would be necessary to tell if this is really the case.
If not, then why does Miyamoto make things like this up? He might be the greatest game designer of all time. But when it comes to things of the past, it looks like this guy cannot be truted about anything.
I can totally imagine developers and designers making up these kinds of stories just so they have anything interesting to say in interviews.
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DRW
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by DRW »

Kasumi wrote:The screenshots you have posted are from the arcade version. Here is the NES/Famicom version:
Image
Given the close release of the two version (arcade/famicom), they were likely developed concurrently.
So, you think that the NES version is basically the master version, being the platform where Luigi was invented and where they first stumbled upon this issue, and only later did they put him into the arcade game, but they still released the arcade version many months earlier?
tokumaru wrote:I guess it's possible that the palette in question contains all of Luigi's colors along with all of the Shellcreepers' colors
The blue color isn't shared either. Also, Miyamoto specifically mentioned the skin color being the same as the turtle's orange.
tokumaru wrote:I can totally imagine developers and designers making up these kinds of stories just so they have anything interesting to say in interviews.
So, this means, there doesn't exist any interesting trivia that's actually true?
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Kasumi
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by Kasumi »

DRW wrote:So, you wanna tell me that the NES version is basically the master version, being the platform where Luigi was invented and where they first stubmled upon this issue, and only later did they put him into the arcade game, but they still released the arcade version many months earlier?
Consider this: The games were not on Steam. When a thing was finished didn't correspond to when it was released because there was a (very large) manufacturing step. Perhaps manufacturing carts was easier than making arcade cabinets, but there had to be a lot more of them.

Maybe they started building them at the same time, and the cabinets finished first. Maybe they didn't.
Maybe that NES version was the master copy. Maybe it wasn't.
Maybe a bug was found that delayed that NES version. Maybe not.
Maybe arcade owners demanded an exclusivity period. Maybe not.

Why not give the guy the benefit of the doubt based on the famicom version actually existing?

Even if he's mistaken, why would your assumption be that he's actively making things up? Maybe he's in his sixties, maybe the events in question happened half his lifetime ago. I can't imagine talking about an event from 30 years ago and needing to be absolutely correct, and for this he's probably right.

Heck, a translation error might even be able to account for both the cloud and hat quote. Even if not... like... he probably has much more to worry about than interview quotes being 100% correct.
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by tokumaru »

Another possibility is that at some point during development they did in fact share the same colors, meaning that this was indeed the reason Luigi's clothes were colored green, but at a later point in time before the release, the palettes were rearranged for some reason, but by then green was already the established color for Luigi, so it remained like this. I'm taking out of my ass of course, I can't possibly know any of this! :wink:
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by rainwarrior »

The statement is exactly true for the Famicom version. Yes, it was released 2 months later than the arcade version, apparently. So what?

For all the impossible questions that DRW does ask, this really isn't one of them. Kasumi's answer fits like a glove. I don't see why you'd need to resort to bad translations or bad memories to explain anything here.

They got this game out in arcades, the Famicom, and Atari 2600 all in the same year. Making cartridges and distributing them to stores was a process that took many months to accomplish. A two month gap is hardly significant enough to be evidence of sequential development.

The idea that one version has to be the "master" original is misguided. Games are very often developed for multiple platforms simultaneously. If they knew they were going to be restrained for the Famicom version, it's prudent that they would choose similar colours for the Arcade version as well.

If you'd like to read a very good example of this, there's an interesting book by Jordan Mechner about the development of Prince of Persia. He started the game on Apple II after the success of Karateka, but the Apple II market was shrinking and development went on much longer than expected. Brøderbund wanted to make sure it was ready for more popular platforms, and he describes overlapping development for MS DOS and other platforms, and how the MS DOS version seemed to become the "definitive" version, despite not being the original target. (The book is journals written during development, by the way, so there's no fear that his memory is failing, either.)
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by ccovell »

I do agree with DRW that Miyamoto / Nintendo do change their stories when a new "reality" suits them for upcoming games, changing tides of gamers, or whatever.

Recently, Miyamoto out of nowhere said that Mario (the character) is about 24 / 25 years of age, after originally calling him "ossan" ("middle-aged man") for decades.

Another is the Koopa kids from Mario 3 not actually being Bowser/Koopa's children. Because Bowser has his own kid in recent Mario franchises, see?

I'm not one of those people who screams "CANON!" whenever changes to storylines happen. But I do notice when clearly someone is pissing on me and calling it rain. Maybe it is a trait of Japanese companies/ pop media that say, "This is the new reality; please accept our new reality <smile>."

As for Luigi being green? Who knows? Red/Green/Blue/Yellow are the pens that a graphic designer reaches for the most often, right?
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by Drag »

As mentioned in a previous thread, Miyamoto had direct involvement in the design of the early launch games for the Famicom, and if he wasn't working on the games himself, he was offering help to other teams to design around the NES's spec.

Mario Bros. arcade was released in Japan July 14, 1983. The Famcom was released the next day, and the Famicom port came less than two months later.

It's not a stretch of the imagination for the Famicom port to be developed at the same time as the arcade version (since it's very likely the Famicom itself was), and for Luigi's green colors in the arcade version to be a direct result of a design choice for the Famcom port. As you pointed out, Luigi's palette in the arcade version is seperate from anything else. Therefore, it would've been simple to change his palette to green at any point during development, including the day before rom-freeze. For Miyamoto's words to be true, they had to have the Famicom port in mind as they were developing the arcade version, because what he says is true for the port.

This sounds very probable to me, and I wouldn't have any reason to believe Miyamoto to be lying about this.
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DRW
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by DRW »

Alright, I have to admit: I didn't have the NES version in mind. I didn't consider the possibility that both versions of "Mario Bros." might have actually been created simultaneously since this was definitely not the norm for other games. Usually, console ports were just that: Ports.
(I mean, they didn't even use a 32 KB ROM to do a decent port of "Donkey Kong", even though the Famicom would have been capable of natively handling it without a mapper and even though "Donkey Kong" was the Famicom's launch title and their most famous game up until then.)

But as ccovell said as well: Miyamoto is known for bullshit like this. (I have heard about Mario being 25, but the fact that he always called him middle-aged was new to me as well.) So, yeah, I thought this was nonsense too after seeing the "Mario Bros." arcade screenshots.

So, in this one instance, I was wrong and Miyamoto said the truth. In other instances: Not so much.


By the way, while we're at it: What do you think of the whole theory that "Super Mario Bros. 3" was not actually an adventure by Mario, but just a play that he and the other characters performed?
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by tokumaru »

DRW wrote:What do you think of the whole theory that "Super Mario Bros. 3" was not actually an adventure by Mario, but just a play that he and the other characters performed?
Does it really matter? It isn't a real adventure either way, since it's just a computer simulation. I couldn't care less about the excuse that justifies the effects that take place within the simulation, as long as the simulation is fun to interact with. Besides, wasn't SMB2 just a dream? Anyway, it really doesn't change the game at all. Some people get too hung up on the story, but back then, stories were nothing more than excuses meant to set up the game, with little to no impact on the games themselves.
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by DRW »

Of course it has no effect on playing the game. But I find it interesting to talk about stuff like that: Story, as thin as it might be, and the general canon.
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by tepples »

Much of the evidence of Super Mario Bros. 3 being a stage play, such as block platforms shadowing onto the sky, was corrected in the All-Stars facelift.

And if this intrigues you, you might appreciate the Mario timeline that the Game Theory team claims to have figured out. Apparently, the first player character in Super Mario Bros. is named Mario Mario Jr., and the first player character in Donkey Kong Country is named Donkey Kong III.
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Re: Claim by Miyamoto: WTF???

Post by DRW »

tepples wrote:Much of the evidence of Super Mario Bros. 3 being a stage play, such as block platforms shadowing onto the sky, was corrected in the All-Stars facelift.
Well, I have my own explanation about the stage play thing, but I'd like to hear other people's opinions first.
tepples wrote:And if this intrigues you, you might appreciate the Mario timeline that the Game Theory team claims to have figured out. Apparently, the first player character in Super Mario Bros. is named Mario Mario Jr., and the first player character in Donkey Kong Country is named Donkey Kong III.
Yeah, I've seen this game theory stuff in the past.
The idea that DK's Mario is SMB's Mario's father is complete bullshit. There was never any indication that this is the case. This is pure fan fiction.

DKC's Donkey Kong being the third one is correct, though. This was confirmed since Cranky Kong is the arcade DK and DKC's DK is his grandson.

At least this was the case in the Super Nintendo days. By now, I believe that Nintendo has forgotten about Cranky Kong being supposed to be the original arcade Donkey Kong.

I mean, think about it: In the new DKC games, is there any mention of this? Does Cranky Kong still do his "In the old days of videogames" speeches?

Also, isn't Donkey Kong (the modern one) called "Mario's first rival" in one of those "Super Smash Bros." trophies? They also brought out some games with modern Donkey Kong kidnapping Pauline and being a general antagonist to Mario. So, I think they just merged old DK and new DK into the same person while Cranky Kong is just his grandpa, but not the old DK anymore. This would also explain why the DK with the tie is shown as a baby together with baby Mario.

So, yeah, I like talking about this stuff, but I generally dislike the way Game Theories does it by completely inventing stuff out of thin air, like DK Mario being a separate person from modern Mario.
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