Discuss in Talkback

At GDC 2006, Michael "TYP" Cole joined Katsuya Eguchi and translator Tim O'Leary for a chat about the Animal Crossing series and Mr. Eguchi's previous work on games such as Star Fox and Super Mario World.

TYP: Personally, what inspired you and your team to make a communication game, even if it was originally a "communication adventure" game?

Eguchi: It really came out of desire for me to improve communication within my own family. While I was working at Nintendo there would be many, many late nights when I would come home after my children had gone to bed. And I know that my children were playing games while I was gone, but I wasn’t sure what kind of games they were doing, or even outside of games, what sort of things they were doing while I wasn’t around. And really there wasn’t a lot of communication in that area, again because they were sleeping when I got home. So, one thing that I wanted to do was to create some way for us to communicate with each other and have some sort of shared experience, and I thought the game genre really contained that possibility. So, I thought that if I could have something we could do together, even if we weren’t there at the same time, there’s some sort of an activity that we could share through letters or message boards and things like that within the game, I thought that would be a great idea. And that was pretty much the seed of the idea.

TYP: What techniques did you use in Animal Crossing to create an environment that encouraged exploration?

Eguchi: That’s a very good question, kind of a hard question. To be honest I think we put a lot of things in the game that would react to whatever the player was doing. And hopefully through trying some different things, and what they player tried was really based on what the player saw, what the player was interested in, what the player—their self-motivation for doing things. So, if they did something and there was a reaction, of course, that breeds curiosity. Now what we did—we educated them a little bit, and showed them some of the possibilities of the game for going out again and trying to encourage them to trying do things by themselves through the part time job that you have to have with Tom Nook at the beginning of the game where he’s "Go talk to the villagers, the other townsfolk," and then while you’re talking to them people are telling you, "you shouldn’t eat this," "you shouldn’t do this" and they give you some ideas, hints, of all the different things you can do within the game. And what if the player has an idea that "all of this freedom I have can lead to interesting things if I just get up and go try stuff"? I think that’s what we try to do, but really a lot of it is left up in the air. This is your place, do what you want, but hopefully some of the rewards that we built in the system encouraged it. . .without being too heavy-handed.

TYP: Did the open-ended nature of Animal Crossing require any changes to Nintendo’s design patterns?

Eguchi: No, not really. I don’t think we had any influence on the way Nintendo makes games or the way we think about our designs at all. Of course, we’re going to have games with stories and endings and beginnings and whatnot, like Zelda, of course. And then, again, we didn’t set out to change the paradigm, so again, we’re going to continue to make stories that, like a Zelda that have a beginning and ending and a story and whatnot. But we’re also going to make games that might not and it’s just what we think is fun and entertaining.

TYP: Based off feedback and observations of players, is there anything you wish you could’ve changed about Animal Crossing: Wild World?

Eguchi: Kind of just post mortem, looking back at the game, a couple things that were surprising, a couple things I thought we did well. The thing that was the biggest surprise for us was the fact that, as I mentioned yesterday, through the end of this week in Japan, we’ve shipped two million four hundred eighty thousand copies of the game. Of course that’s far above what we had expected. So that’s really amazing. As far as things we think we could’ve done better, I don’t really have anything specific. But one thing I’m proud of, one thing I think we did a good job with was upholding our end of the bargain with the WiFi connection in that people can use it worry-free. What we mean by worry-free, and I know you’ve probably heard this before, what we mean is that you can play online without having to worry who you’re going to be playing with, or who’s going to talk smack with you, who’s going to camp on your small point. We don’t have any of that issue. And the system works out that if people who want to play with just people they know and just people they’ve exchanged friend codes with they can do that if they want to do that. If they want to do Internet postings, "Here’s my village, come check me out," whatever. That’s okay, too. I think we did a good job of setting up a structure that allows players to just get online and play without having to worry about some of the things you have to worry about in other games.

TYP: You mentioned one of the things you were surprised by is the idle chit-chat that players found online on Wild World. Do you wish you could’ve included Voice-Over IP like we’ve seen in Metroid Prime: Hunters?

Eguchi: Yeah, we wanted to do that. That would’ve been great. And we did some looking into it. The problem that we found is that with Animal Crossing, when you’re doing any sort of wireless communicating there is so much data that has to go back and forth. Did you plant flowers? Did you drop an item off? You know you’ve got four people in town, where are they at? What are they doing? How are they interacting with the environment? There’s so much data to keep track of. With Metroid Prime Hunters—and this is kind of just surmising or guessing, I guess—I think probably they have to keep track of where the player is, you know where they’re shooting, maybe their ammunition. But, the amount information they have to track is definitely less than what you have to do in Animal Crossing. And, while we did look at the voice possibilities, it just proved to be a little too difficult and we just had to say, "okay, never mind."

TYP: I’d like to ask you questions about your earlier games. You mentioned you worked on both Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. Which is the better game? (laughter)

Eguchi: We can’t answer, they’re both very good! (laughter)

TYP: Why do you think they’re both such timeless classics?

Eguchi: That’s a really tough—I mean... I’m not sure as far as being timeless, I don’t know. I think for me, when I look at it, is a game interesting or not really has nothing to do with how a game looks, how a game sounds or any of that. It’s just, when you pick it up play is it fun? And if you pick it up and play it and it’s fun, then it’s going to be fun now, as it was fun fifteen years ago. And it really doesn’t matter how old a game is, I think people who played a game a long time ago and pick it today, if they enjoyed it then they’re probably going to enjoy it now. People who’ve never played it are going to pick it up and regardless of what it looks like, what it sounds like, if they pick it up and that initial impression is, "Oh this is fun, I like what I’m doing," then the game’s going to stick around and I think that really is everything.

TYP: Both of those games had some very clever levels. Do you have any favorites?

Eguchi: Well, yeah. . .you know, I did make them, but I haven’t played them in so long that it’s hard to remember. Well, I can tell you maybe one that I created that I remember, how’s that? A lot of the courses that I designed had puzzle elements. So, for me, the courses that I liked were again the ones with puzzle elements where you could see an item you wanted and you just had to figure out how to get there. Those are the types of courses [I] like.

TYP: You apologized yesterday for both of those games’ difficulty. Why do you regret their difficulty?

Eguchi: I think that comes from the fact that I remember, at the time, when we were making these games, there were some very difficult things in them and that my apology comes from the fact that not everyone who purchased a game finished. So the people who were good game players, or were really persistent and got all the way through—good for them, that’s great. The people who purchased it, and were unable to get through even half of the game, I think that as far as enjoyment they probably had a great time with what they played, but if I look at the time they were paying maybe forty dollars for a game, but they only got to play half the game, they didn’t get to see portions of the game, maybe they didn’t get their money’s worth. And that’s where that came from. So it was more of a "value oriented" apology.

TYP: Super Mario World was the only game I had for the Super Nintendo for probably three months, and I played it for all that three months.

Eguchi: Obviously the challenge of that game is really a lot of fun and I think a lot of players enjoy just trying to play over and over and over, the replay value you know, "I gotta get through this level," "I gotta run back there." But, for now, what I’m looking towards is playing games, creating games that people can play together, that everyone can enjoy, rather than be with that personal, one-on–one, "me and the game" experience.

TYP: Do you think you struck a better balance with Yoshi’s Story?

Eguchi: That’s a tough one. I don’t think the game was overly difficult. That being said, I don’t think we were able to get the replay value as high as we had hoped.

TYP: You also directed StarFox for the Super Nintendo. You didn’t play any major role in any other StarFox games. What’s your opinion of the franchise's evolution?

Eguchi: Tough question. (long pause) My own personal opinion, this is not really Nintendo’s opinion, just mine alone...I think of StarFox as a shooter, and not an overly complicated one. When we were working on the game we were working on it was just shooting, shooting, and then more shooting. So, I don’t think StarFox is a franchise that really needs a lot of story, a lot of bells and whistles, a lot of realism or too complicated [mechanics]. I kind of like that streamlined version where you’re shooting things. So, that’s StarFox to me.

TYP: You think a traditional StarFox game would work on the DS?

Eguchi: Yeah, I think it would work on the DS. I think if that were the case, there are two things I would like to see happen. One is that all levels--like we talked about with Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros 3 and Yoshi’s story—all levels playable by all gamers. Something that’s accessible to everyone. And then just protecting that idea StarFox is a shooter. That they’re fighter pilots and they’ll want to be in their ships flying and shooting, so without being overly complicated and have it accessible to everyone. If they were going to make it for the DS, those would be my main—I guess that would be my input.

TYP: One final question. As a game designer for Nintendo, what are you most proud of over the years?

Eguchi: I think the thing I’m most proud of is really Nintendo’s approach to approaching things that we think are fun or interesting. No matter what anyone else is saying, what everyone else is doing; the way that we’ll attack it from all sides trying to figure out, “wow this is cool!" and what to do with it. The way that Nintendo does that is something that I’m very proud of.

TYP: Well, thank you very much.