Have you ever wondered why Mario's second banana is all decked out in green? Shigeru Miyamoto finally spills the beans, to Rolling Stone of all parties.
In a piece entitled "Shigeru Miyamoto Shares Nintendo Secrets", 18 so-called secrets are exposed at last. As for the "co-called" designation, much of what the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Link, and so much more details should be old news for most seasoned gamers. But for the average Rolling Stones reader, much of it might be brand new, unheard of info.
Though the reasons behind Luigi's shade is indeed a revelation. So what's the deal exactly? Miyamoto starts off by explaining how, due to the technical constraints of the original Mario Bros arcade game, because of limited memory to be exact, the second playable character had to looks just like the first one.
"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.'"
Miyamoto goes onto to state how the above illustrates what a designer must do, and that's accept technical challenges for what they are and forge ahead nonetheless:
"How do you take those constraints and create something that's unique and then layer on a story or some kind of a background that explains why those things exist? Ultimately that's the reason that Luigi is green, but it's one of those little development anecdotes that I wanted to share and is to me an important facet of designing: how you use what could be a constraint and use that to develop something new."
Even though most of the other secrets is somewhat common knowledge, as already stated, the entire Rolling Stones piece is a fun read nonetheless, since we're hearing it all from Miyamoto's mouth.
Though there are a few other genuinely brand new tidbits, like how he also used Flipnote Studio to create storyboards for cinematics and why there's a reason the low number of first party releases from Nintendo, which began with the Nintendo 64.
