Nintendo R&D1 Interview

Kikizo dropped by at Nintendo's enigmatic global HQ to chat with the six-member "Wario Ware All-Star Team", headed by Metroid talent Yoshi Sakamoto.

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Kikizo: The first thing we want to know about the Wario Ware games is how did the series start? What inspired it?

GA: Well to tell you the truth, this happened a couple of years ago. At the time our team was working on a game called Mario Artist: Polygon Studio for the N64 DD. As you know it was an extra accessory for the N64. In Polygon Studio you could create 3D models and animate them in the game, but there was also a side game included inside. In this game you would have to play short games that came one after another. This is where the idea for Wario Ware came from.

Naoko Mori

YS: To add on that, we got the idea of using Wario and the other characters because we couldn't think of anyone else who would be best for the role. Wario is always doing stupid things and is really idiotic, so we thought him and the rest of the characters would be best for the game.

Kikizo: Was it difficult to approve the first game?

YS: Actually, to tell you the truth we made the game secretly. We were talking about the idea of the game with some other people on the team and then we decided to just make it without telling our manager at the time.

Kikizo: So was he surprised when you presented the idea to him?

YS: No, not really. He didn't seem surprised, he just said "okay" and we started to work on the game again. We thought that we had this great idea for a game and that it would be completed no matter what!

Wario Ware: Signed - Print and sell on ebay!

Kikizo: What's the story behind the strange ideas, such as the nose-picking mini-games?

GA: The way the games were created was that each person had to come up with their own games. So what we did was we wrote down the game ideas we had on Post-It Notes - you know, those notes with the sticky adhesive on the back of them - and we attached them to the director's table. Then we went through all of them to decide which games were good and which ones weren't.

It actually got very crazy because while the game started with just the programmers giving their ideas, it became well-known around the department, so other people who weren't on the project began to submit their ideas to the director on Post-It Notes too!

Kikizo: Were there any mini-games that weren't used? How did you decide which games to use?

Taku Sugioka

GA: There were some games that we didn't include because they were either too obscene, or they were too Japanese. There were some games that we thought that people would not understand, so we decided not to use them (ed. note: some of the ideas were shown to us at the interview -- such as a couple playing on a small Japanese drum -- but we could not take pictures of them.)

Most importantly, if the game was too difficult to play, then we didn't use it. We wanted to make sure that the game was easy to understand, and that you could play it with your instinct, and just by looking at the screen. If you could not understand what you had to do in the game just by looking at it, then it would be too difficult.

Kikizo: So, how many games were actually thought of during the first Wario Ware game?

GA: That's a really tough question since it was very long ago, but I believe that the number was around 300 games. We included only about a hundred of the games in the first Wario Ware.

Kikizo: Do you think that the humour in the game is too difficult to understand?

YS: Yes, there were some games that were just too strange! Actually, this happened because when we started the project, each person tried to make their games better than everyone else. So people would think of better ideas as the game was developing. It was like a competition to see who would make the strangest game. What do you think of the humour? Tell us!

Kikizo: Well uh, I think it's pretty cool. It's hard to understand at times but it's weird so it's funny to me! How did the art design come about? The style of the game is very unique compared to other titles.

KT: Well, the characters in the game had to be consistent, so it's important to think of the graphics as two separate categories: the main game graphics and the putti (mini-game) graphics. We wanted the graphics for Wario and his friends to be the same, so that people weren't confused when playing the game.

YS: To add to that, when everyone was coming up with their own ideas, each of the programmers also started working on their own graphics for the game, which is why the style is very different with each mini-game.

Kikizo: Do you think we'll see a new Wario game that combines MaWaRu and SaWaRu?

YS: That's a difficult question to answer. Technically it could work but I don't see we'd see anything like that in the future. With the Wario games, we want the game to use new technology to offer a different experience every time. So yes, we could do a game that combined the elements of MaWaRu and SaWaRu, but I don't think that we would actually do it.

Ko Takeuchi

Kikizo: Why did the Wario Ware team grow so fast between MaWaRu and SaWaRu?

GA: It's because everyone was working on making new games! At the time, MaWaRu was just ending when we started SaWaRu. We finished MaWaRu in August, but we started SaWaRu in June, so it was difficult to work on both projects at the same time, which is why we needed to bring in more people for the project. SaWaRu was to be an extremely important title for the launch of the Nintendo DS, and it needed to be available from the beginning no matter what, so that's why we had a lot of people on the project. Once the team that was working on MaWaRu was finished with the game, they joined the SaWaRu team to complete the title in preparation for the Nintendo DS launch. In total, it took about five months to complete SaWaRu with our team, so we're very proud that we were able to do it!

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