Really cool expose from the Japanese Casa BRUTUS magazine celebrating 40 years of Mario. Its got behind the scenes archival dev material and information on how the original game was made and even an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. I don't think there is an English translation yet, but tried my best.
My fav thing - fun as a system:
"Continuing to think about the mechanisms by which people think, ‘This is interesting.’" Fun is not inspiration or taste, but a mechanism that can be studied is a cool concept.
Key takeaways:
- The entire game fit in 40 kilobytes — less data than a single modern image file.
- Developers used graph paper to plot every course before writing a line of code.
- Clouds and bushes are the same sprite, recoloured to save memory.
- Early ideas for enemies included flying shells and ground-attacking walls that never shipped.
- Mario’s hat and moustache were added because animating hair and mouths was impossible with so few pixels.
- Every sound and motion was meant to feel alive - “You can almost hear the ‘ding’ of a block when you just look at it.”
Best Quotes:
- “What we valued most was that he would be fun to move."
- “We kept asking, what makes people think, ‘This is interesting!’?”
- “If you draw it with your hands, you can feel whether it’s fun or not.”
- “With only 40K, you have to be inventive — not by adding, but by re-using.”
- “If nothing happens, people quickly become bored. But if too many things happen, people become tired.”
- “We valued the interval that makes players think, ‘Something might happen next.’”
- "Technology advances, but the human sense of what feels ‘interesting’ does not change that much.”
So great!