Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [69]
What would make everyone happy would be a SNES 3-D Mario game that Miyamoto could merely supervise, so he could focus on Mario 64 another year or so. He had already shelved one completed game—Star Fox 2— for the counterintuitive reason that it was in 3-D. Miyamoto wanted the N64 and 3-D to be linked in people’s minds, and releasing too many 3-D SNES titles would diminish that mental connection. He made an exception for a Mario RPG made by Square, the geniuses behind the Final Fantasy franchise, who had an office in the same Redmond office park as Nintendo.
The plot (yes, a real plot!) turned on new villain Smithy attacking the Mushroom Kingdom, forcing Mario and Bowser to ally against him. It would feature turn-based combat (the hallmark of RPGs) but with new action elements. For instance, selecting “jump” from a battle menu makes Mario jump on an enemy, but a well-timed button press during the jump animation will earn extra damage. The SNES, boosted by the Super FX chip, would display everything isometrically, as if the whole game were seen from a corner-mounted security camera. Square would prerender every element of the game in 3-D: characters from all angles, backgrounds, items, walls, coins. They’d even handle special lighting effects, which helped sell the illusion that this was a real place.
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars would be Mario’s final outing on the SNES, and one of Square’s last on SNES too. Early SNESes had been around so long they were literally yellowing with age. Everyone was migrating to the N64: Square was already developing the seventh installments of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy for it. Square, based in the busy port city of Yokohama, had been exclusive to Nintendo for a decade. But it had a problem with one of Nintendo’s recent decisions: cartridges.
Despite Nintendo’s and Sega’s debacles with their CD-based add-ons, storing game information on a cheap, capacious CD-ROM still seemed like a no-brainer. Certainly it would allow games such as Final Fantasy VII to create novelistic depths to its story and characters. There were some pluses to cartridges: they loaded information faster than CD-ROMs, they were harder to pirate, and they could be upgraded from game to game. But they held less than a tenth of the data a CD-ROM did, with little room for full-motion video or rich textures. And they were much more expensive, heavy, and tougher to manufacture. Yamauchi’s choice to yoke the N64 to cartridges was like an artist finding all the paint and canvas in the world, but still being told to sketch on napkins with a pencil.
One way to avoid the texture-shading problem of too little data was to use something called Gouraud shading, which results in a bouncy, cartoonish look. That was perfect for Miyamoto, who used it well in Super Mario 64, and in the other 3-D launch game he was working on, a sequel to Pilotwings. But it would be tough for a game to not have a cartoony look on the N64, though, without serious blurriness. This continued the impression that Nintendo was just for kids.
While Super Mario RPG used the isometric camera, Miyamoto could go freeform with the camera for Super Mario 64. But first he had to get Mario’s movement right. His team worked for months moving around Mario and a sleepy bunny nicknamed Mips (which stood for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, the N64’s flavor of CPU). The plumber gained a variety of new moves—backflips, wall jumps, double and triple jumps. To demonstrate how he wanted Mario’s swimming to look in 3-D, Miyamoto even stretched out on a desk and mimed it. Once Mario could move, and was done paying tribute to Lewis Carroll by chasing a rabbit around, the team settled on how the camera should move.
The Super Mario 64 plot hinges on a winningly awful MacGuffin: cake. Bowser takes over Princess Peach’s castle, full of paintings that are portals to other worlds. Mario, who stopped by because Princess Peach offered him some cake, has to defeat Bowser’s minions in each