Nintendo’s next generation

The brilliant work of the man leading games on Nintendo Switch

As the creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto is rightfully the most famous game developer in the world. Just as his creation is Nintendo’s mascot, Miyamoto is the company’s public face. When Nintendo announced the first Mario game for smartphones, it was Miyamoto who appeared on stage at Apple’s event to show off Super Mario Run.

But at Nintendo’s big Switch event on January 12th, Miyamoto was conspicuous by his absence: His only appearance came after an hour, for a cameo that lasted less than a minute.

Instead, the task of introducing the new console and the unique Joy-Con controllers fell to Yoshiaki Koizumi, general producer for Switch software. Nintendo fans may know him as the director of Super Mario Galaxy, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.

What you might not realise is that before that, he made a string of major contributions to some of Nintendo’s greatest games.

• Koizumi started on Link’s Awakening, the first Zelda title for Game Boy. Originally tasked with designing the instruction manual, he ended up writing the entire story. Koizumi is often called a romantic by his peers, which may explain why Link’s Awakening has one of the more touching scenes in a Zelda game:

• Koizumi was Assistant Director of Super Mario 64. Mario’s first 3D outing was a landmark for the whole industry, establishing many of the rules and conventions for how game characters should move and act in a 3D space
• After Mario, it was only natural that Nintendo would bring Zelda to 3D. Creating The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was seen as a more difficult task, because of the complexity of sword fighting in 3D: When characters have the freedom to move anywhere, it’s hard to line up properly to duel with an enemy. Koizumi came up with a solution after watching a samurai-versus-ninja stage performance, noticing that the gang of enemies would take it in turns to attack the lone hero, one-by-one. That insight into stage fighting choreography led to Z-Targeting, a system that allows the player to lock on to an enemy, keeping their aim on a single opponent no matter where they move:

• Koizumi also made other contributions to the game widely hailed as the greatest of all time: He designed Adult Link, named the horse Epona, and created Navi the fairy… but we’ll forgive him for that last one.
• Tasked with building the sequel to Ocarina of Time in only one year, many assumed it would be very similar to the first game. Instead, Koizumi gave The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask a unique premise that had more in common with the film Groundhog Day. Set in a world that will be destroyed by the falling moon in three days, players must repeat those 72 hours, over and over again, until they find a way to stop it. Koizumi actually came up with this idea for another game entirely, before he was asked to join the team.
• As you might imagine from a game where the world is about to end, Majora’s Mask was a fairly dark game. This direction, new to the Zelda series, came from Koizumi: So much so that co-director Eiji Aonuma felt he had to add light-hearted elements to balance it out. The game’s standout side-quest involves re-uniting a couple; the husband-to-be runs away after being cursed into the body of a child, too embarrassed to tell his future bride of his fate. She patiently waits for him, until he appears with just minutes to go, and they wait for the end of the world together:

• And then there’s Koizumi’s opus, Super Mario Galaxy. A joyful and inventive spin on the formula established by Super Mario 64, Mario soars through space, with action taking place on a series of tiny planets — some of which you can run around in just a couple of seconds. But one of the most surprising elements was an illustrated storybook section, which Koizumi wrote late at night without telling anyone:

That is an incredible body of work from any developer, but one that’s easily lost when you work at the same company as Shigeru Miyamoto.

While Koizumi’s contributions are varied, one theme stands out: Storytelling. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that he studied filmmaking before joining Nintendo.

Koizumi has always fought to put more storytelling in his games, admitting that sometimes he’d have to sneak elements in so Miyamoto — who cared far more about gameplay than plot — wouldn’t notice. The two are close enough that Miyamoto once described them as a “married couple”, but still, they clashed enough in their approaches that they had a long heart-to-heart to work out their differences while developing Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Still, Koizumi seems to have made a lasting impact: It can be argued that his work on Link’s Awakening marked the point where Nintendo started to take stories in games more seriously.

Nobody can match the legacy of the man who created Mario. But Koizumi’s work has been incredibly important in shaping modern Nintendo, and having his guiding hand over their new console bodes very well for games on Switch.