The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, the sequel to Nintendo’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie from 2023, made its international debut on April 1 this year. Ahead of the Japanese premiere of the movie, scheduled for April 24, game director and producer Shigeru Miyamoto recently participated in a joint media interview to celebrate the release. Talking to Nintendo Dream Web, Miyamoto spoke about why it took Nintendo so long to take the plunge and start producing feature films based on their IPs.
“Since we don’t know what kind of game we’ll be making next, giving our characters too complex backstories can end up becoming a constraint for us. I don’t mind the constraints when it comes to gameplay mechanics, but the reason why we avoided making movies for so long is precisely because we didn’t want to be constrained by establishing a story,” Miyamoto explained.
This checks out considering Nintendo’s focus on “play over story” and user-friendliness in most of their games. With such a huge cast of characters, it could be difficult to offer a wide variety of games and unique gameplay experiences while having to track a canonical storyline and lore over decades of releases.
Apparently, this is why Princess Peach, who’s been a key character in the Mario series for many decades, didn’t have a concrete backstory until Nintendo kicked off with producing the movies. “Working on the movies, it has become super fun to expand on the characters in various ways,” Miyamoto added. “That’s why, in future games, we want to stick to the backstories we’ve established in the movies as much as possible.”
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie explores the character of Princess Peach, unveiling one big secret about her origin (which we won’t be mentioning due to spoilers). However, Miyamoto confirms that, while her backstory was decided specifically for the movie, the plot-twist is canon, and will likely appear or be referenced in future Nintendo games.
On a related note, the live-action Legend of Zelda movie is coming to theaters in 2027, so it will be interesting to see how Nintendo adapted the original material and whether any new movie twists will impact the canon of the video game series.
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I hope he knows you can have a concrete backstory for a few things and still be flexible with making games. When playing Mario titles, where a character comes from isn’t exactly important. Much like a Zelda title, it gets spun into a new tale but with familiar elements, but there’s always new things there.
All that Hollywood money really changed his tune
And now Nintendo and Sony avoid making games lol
Just here to say that the Google link that brought me to the article, spoiled it, but your article didn’t. Not sure how that works but it was interesting.
Google’s Discover Feed will sometimes take multiple articles regarding the same general topic, put them together as one entry on the feed, and give it an AI-generated title based on the content within the articles. So sometimes they spoil things unintentionally.
This mindset is what makes video games so lacking these days. The story is often dropped or overlooked and it’s really disappointing.
I know right? It’s even more frustrating to realize that Aonuma has developed a lot of the same thoughts for the Legend of Zelda series, so much so that he’s even convinced himself that even a bit of linearity is also restrictive, even though it’s healthy for a game to have some sense of direction for the player. Like a 100% free game is completely doable and can be fun, but when every game goes that direction it just gets boring and makes everything feel the same (ironically further limiting game direction as they feel compelled to fit a certain mold.)
The best way to spark innovation is through limitations. Games in the past were super creative because they had to think outside the box to make their worlds com alive with hardware that had limited capacity. Now that box is so big that it might as well not exist, and if they continue to think about wanting 0 restrictions in development then they’re just going to find the innovation that made their company what it is begin to wane as they continue to put all of their eggs, their ideas, into one basket 😕
So they are now willing to change lore that’s been literally known for the entire game series? If they are making Peach’s backstory Canon, are they making her relations and family Canon as well?
They’ve already said Peach’s backstory of being a lost sister of Rosalina would be accounted for going forward
I would love if we got some canon backstory on Peach’s family. The only instance I know of are them mentioning the Mushroom King in the SMB instruction booklet and a few brief appearances of him in the comic books from the late 80’s-early 90’s. Getting to meet Mario’s parents and extended family was one of the highlights of the first movie for me
This is such a cop out. There’s no way this is the real reason, Mario went bad and it left a sour taste in Nintendo’s mouths for years.
I can’t wait for these dumb boomers to die at nintendo, back in the day they were pushing the industry forward now theyre just holding back their own brand.