Hideo Kojima has done a new interview with Wired Tokyo, as part of a series where participants answer quickfire questions submitted by the public. There’s a fair amount of familiar ground trodden, including some gushing over his favourite film directors, but one slightly unexpected answer came when Kojima was asked what game he’s played the most.
“Super Mario Bros., definitely,” answers Kojima without missing a beat. The 1985 masterpiece probably doesn’t seem like the most obvious source of inspiration for a creator known for cinematic excess and overarching narrative ambition but, as Kojima goes on to point out, it’s one hell of a good game.
“Played it for a year. I was a college student. I skipped school to play at home,” laughs Kojima. “Without Super Mario, I probably wouldn’t have been in this industry. Yeah. I can’t really play it now, though. It’s a side-scrolling action game. Mario just goes left to right. Basically just jumping. But there’s a dash button, use that and the jump subtly changes the trajectory to attack or dodge.”
That’s exactly what set Super Mario Bros. apart from other platformers of the time, the balance and subtlety in speed and how that would affect your jumps. It’s a game that still feels good to play now thanks to how much Nintendo wrings out of those two buttons.
“It had almost no story,” continues Kojima, “but it felt like you were on an adventure. When I saw that, although it was pixel art with no story, I felt this medium would one day surpass movies. It was the catalyst that brought me to the game industry.”
Super Mario Bros. is hardly alone for the era in being narrative-light, but what Nintendo did was craft an amazing and varied visual world filled with surprising elements, incorporating influences from Japanese folklore to Alice in Wonderland: Why do you think he gets bigger when he eats a mushroom? The Mushroom Kingdom was just background in a way, sure, but it felt like a world and, as Kojima says, an escalating adventure through one.
Elsewhere in the interview, Kojima is asked about his predictions around technology in MGS2. He says the game “is often mistaken for a story about AI, but it’s about digital society… It wasn’t about AI, but interweaving digital data gaining a will of its own. That was the story. So, well…. 24 years have passed. It has become somewhat of a reality. I didn’t predict it, but rather a future I didn’t desire, but unfortunately we’re heading there.”
