Did you know that GBA connectivity almost had a much bigger role in Wind Waker? Or that Olimar’s
wife was abusive? Or did you know that Mario Party was never actually intended to be a series? Lately
we’ve been crawling through hundreds of Japanese magazines looking for interesting tidbits to
translate, and that’s where pretty much all of today’s info came from. We stumbled upon a few
interviews for GameCube games during our research, all of which were bursting with facts we’d never
heard before -- probably because the info never made it to the West. So unless you speak Japanese
or lived in Japan in the early 2000s, you probably haven’t heard any of the stuff in this video.
Today we’re gonna focus on facts from a few ‘Cube titles like Wind Waker, Pikmin 1 and 2,
and a couple Mario games. So let’s jump right in with a round table interview we translated
all about Wind Waker from Japan’s Nintendo Online Magazine -- their January 2003 issue to be exact.
This interview’s in two parts, with the first half featuring Wind Waker’s director Eiji Aonuma,
and key members of the game’s audio team like composers Koji Kondo, Kenta Nagata,
and Hajime Wakai, as well as sound effects programmer Masafumi Kawamura. The interview
opens with a few things we’ve already talked about on the channel before, like how Aonuma
thought about using a theremin as the game’s main instrument instead of a conductor’s baton.
After Aonuma mentions how they strived for high-quality realistic audio, the interviewer
asks if the team used actual seagull cries in their sound design. This is where Kawamura joins
the conversation and starts bringing up details we’ve never heard before. He says “It’s actually
not a seagull [in the game]. We tried using one at first, but it didn’t really sound like a seagull,
so we used altered elephant sounds. We also tried out a lot of other options, like mixing crocodile,
camel, and lion sounds.” For reference, this is what seagulls sound like in Wind Waker We’re not
sure why a seagull didn’t sound like a seagull, or how you turn elephant sounds into that,
but it’s all pretty impressive if you ask us. Then Kawamura mentions how they get a lot of
their sounds from sound effect collection CDs, but that they do grab some of their
own sounds out in the wild. “...I wanted to record the sound of metal hitting a tree,
so I hid a metal pipe in an instrument case and went out into the forest with it.” He also adds
that the sound of walking on sandy beaches were made by shaking a bag of potato chips. Take a
listen. The team talks a little about how they were originally gonna voice all the game’s NPCs
themselves, but it turns out they were, uhh, not good at it. Kawamura remarks that some of
the staff gave good performances, and there were plenty of instances where they’d get good takes,
but problems sprung up when they had to get recordings for unique situations. “There
were a few things where the staff gave good performances, but there are limits to what an
ordinary person can do. Even if there’s a script it might just say “oi”, and even if you tell them
to imagine yelling it out to someone 100 meters away, that’s difficult for a regular person.”
Then the discussion falls to an important note about Wind Waker’s development; that this is the
first 3D Zelda game where Koji Kondo wasn’t solely in charge of the music. In fact, Kondo helmed the
music for basically every console Zelda game besides Zelda II up until Wind Waker. And with
Kawamura, Wakai, and Nagata stepping up, they all decide to drop a little tidbit for us in the
interview about what that was like. Kawamura says that before taking on the role he’d heard that the
only sound effect that carried over from A Link to the Past on SNES to Ocarina of Time on N64 was
the ‘puzzle solved’ sound, so he made sure this was the only sound effect he carried over to the
‘Cube -- to carry on the tradition so to speak. This piqued our interest, so we went through
every sound effect for both games, and although the puzzle solved fanfare is indeed the same,
a bunch of other Ocarina sounds get reused in Wind Waker. The jingles for collecting a new item,
opening a treasure chest, and collecting a heart piece are repeats just to name a few. So if
Kawamura’s telling the truth here, some other devs carried over sounds too. Wakai says he didn't want
to step up at first because he thought that if he helped make the game he’d lose all the pleasure
of playing it. Nagata on the other hand says he’s always wanted to work on Zelda. And this part of
the interview closes out with Aonuma talking about the power of music, and how important it is to the
feel of Zelda. He mentions that he’s played builds of Zelda games in the past with no sound at all,
and that it was actually painful, and felt like the game might never be finished. But
as soon as the audio’s in, all that changes, and you understand the importance of sound.
The next part of the interview centers on Aonuma and Toshiaki Suzuki, who led development on Wind
Waker’s GBA connectivity and the Tingle Tuner. Before Wind Waker, Suzuki directed a buncha stuff,
like Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, and Super Mario Advance. But it’s his
work on Tilt ‘n’ Tumble that caught Aonuma’s eye. Basically, part way through Wind Waker’s
development Aonuma realized he wouldn't be able to finish the main game if he spent much
time on GBA connectivity, so he brought Suzuki in to take the reins. After the introduction,
Aonuma jumps straight into a bunch of tidbits we’ve never heard before, like how the Tingle
Tuner concept came from Miyamoto saying “Zelda's a single player game, but dads want to play too,
right?” Aonuma continued: “That stuck in the back of my mind, and I wondered if we could actually
make something like that. Then I heard about the Game Boy Advance and GameCube’s connectivity.
That's when I came up with a plan for how dads and kids could play together. There was actually
a point when I thought about making this a major part of the game, but that would mean you couldn’t
enjoy it if you didn’t own a GBA, so we settled on the balance we have now.” They elaborate on
this a little more, and seem to say they wanted to let folks control Link on the overworld map
using the GBA from the beginning, and the focus on maps made them start thinking about Tingle,
since he’s a map merchant in Majora’s Mask. Then Aonuma says “At first we envisioned it as walking
around holding Tingle inside the GBA like an insect cage. But Tingle's a character with a
lot of popularity within Nintendo. Ultimately, we expanded his role to appear in the main game too,
and eventually to the point that Tingle has his own island in the main game.”
The devs all had their own vision of who Tingle was, so they had to come together and establish
what it was to be Tingle. Suzuki gives an example of how he casually made a red and
white costume for Tingle, and then was surprised when another dev said that those colors weren’t
very Tingle-like, since he wears green clothes to imitate a fairy. In the final game we see white,
pink, and blue Tingles in the form of Tingles brothers, but never a red Tingle. One of the
most interesting Tingle-centric facts divulged in the interview relates to Wind Waker’s huge max
wallet size of 5000 rupees -- which is ten times the size of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask’s
biggest wallets. Apparently this huge wallet only came about thanks to Tingle. “Tingle gives you
bombs and items in exchange for money. We made the wallet incredibly big to accommodate Tingle. It's
the biggest wallet in the entire Zelda series.” The interview closes out with Aonuma saying how
he thinks this’ll be the last time he works on a Zelda game: “I think this might be the last
time I’m personally involved with Zelda. I’ve already squeezed out every last drop of an idea
to the point that even if they told me to make a sequel, I couldn’t.” Seems he changed his mind,
because he’s basically worked on nothing but Zelda since -- being credited on over a dozen
Zelda titles after Wind Wake’s release. Wind Waker has a fair amount of interesting behind-the-scenes
info, but another ‘Cube title has even more secrets hidden beneath the brush -- Pikmin.
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Xbox One, Windows PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. Now back to the GameCube facts…
We recently translated Nintendo Dream’s January 2002 issue, which has a great interview with
Miyamoto all about Pikmin. And here he says that when he was a kid, he often engaged in
quote-unquote "cruel play." He'd put ants in a leaf boat and send them downriver. With Pikmin,
he wanted to make a game where you can do that kinda thing virtually. And unlike most other video
games, the creatures Pikmin kill aren't actually enemies. He says: "They’re not really evil,
they’re just living their lives there normally. When you start the game you think the [creatures]
are evil, but as you progress you think Olimar might be worse, and then in the end you might
think the Pikmin are actually the bad guys. [Laughs] It’s a game where you can’t make
clear value judgments on the characters." He also mentions how Pikmin was almost a Nintendo 64 game,
but the console was too underpowered -- then later, GameCube turned out almost overpowered.
Quote: "We couldn’t decide whether to make it for N64 or GameCube at first, but when we
started testing it on the N64 we could only get 30 Pikmin moving on screen at a time. We thought it
had to be on the GameCube, then we had 300 Pikmin moving around. Until recently [before release],
we had 200 in-game, but it was hard to handle, so we reduced it to 100." In that same magazine,
he goes on to say they thought about adding more puzzles, but decided against it. This was
because the game’s opening shows Olimar's ship parts fall to the planet's surface,
and it wouldn't make sense if they just happened to land on a bunch of puzzles. They also thought
about every Pikmin having their own individual names and stats, but it would've been too taxing
on the GameCube to generate all that data when a bunch of Pikmin popped out of an onion. They
figured players would've lost track of their favorite Pikmin anyway, like maybe you'd
grow an affection for Red Pikmin Steve, but pretty soon you wouldn't be able to find him.
After the game was finished, Miyamoto says they changed some details in the American localization,
like Olimar's wife beating him. We went through all the Japanese monologues to translate that
Olimar quote, but it looks like it doesn't exist -- maybe Miyamoto was exaggerating,
or Olimar's abusive wife was originally in the game but got removed, even in Japanese. We did
however find that Olimar's wife isn't quite as sweet as you might've thought. She's depicted
in a positive light in the English version, but in Japan, she belittles him. Olimar says, quote:
"my wife is always saying I suck at precise work." Another log says she's quick to anger,
but in the English version it was changed to say it's Olimar's boss who's quick to anger,
instead of the ol' ball and chain. Olimar also has a dream where she's literally forcing Pikpik
carrots down his throat, which was toned down in English. For better or worse, his wife's dark side
was left intact in the English version of Pikmin 2. Speaking of the sequel, we translated another
issue of Nintendo Dream from a few years later, where the devs spend 8 pages talking about Pikmin
2's development. They show a clay figure from back when Purple Pikmin had tails -- it was originally
brought to Miyamoto for his approval, but the tails ended up getting cut. They also say the
Purples were originally a dark green color, but changed them because co-director Hino wanted a
Pikmin type who looked like eggplants. The devs go on to say Louie was originally called Louzee,
to sound like the English word "loser," but they ultimately changed that too.
The other co-director, Abe, says they also considered making it so the longer it took you
to beat the game, the interest on the company's loan would accrue higher and higher. They also
note that if you play long enough, the day counter goes from 99 to 100, then up to 1000, then 10,000,
and so on. Every time a digit's added, the numbers get smaller, and eventually they're too small to
read. We spent an hour going to sunset over and over to show you 100, but ain't no way we're doing
a thousand. A lot of Pikmin 2's treasures got changed in localization, like Japanese
corned beef getting switched out for Skippy peanut butter, and the batteries changing from a Japanese
brand to Duracell. We already covered those in a dedicated Pikmin video 10 years ago, and the
brands got removed from the Switch port anyway, but there's one treasure swap we still wanna
highlight. In this magazine, they say the picture inside the Time Capsule is one of the devs' dogs,
Gon-chan -- but in the original Japanese version, it was Chi-chan, the cat who belongs
to Mr Yamaguchi, who made all the promotional clay figures. For the most part, in the Japanese
version they used branded items that maybe didn't exist anymore, but were commonplace when the devs
were kids. This is because Pikmin 1 was especially popular with women of all ages, so for the sequel
they wanted to target dad's demographic -- guys in their 30's and 40's who'd be nostalgic for those
old Japanese trinkets that don't exist anymore. Basically, the developers' own demographic. Pikmin
fans have long speculated that the lack of humans in the series meant they'd long gone extinct,
and Olimar was exploring a post-apocalyptic Earth. But maybe that's not actually the case.
In this magazine, they note that areas in Pikmin 2 are the altered versions of the
first game's areas. When the interviewer asked why, co-directors Hino and Abe said:
"[The areas aren't] exactly the same, but we intentionally made them look similar to give
a sense of deja vu that you’ve been here before... Like maybe it is the same place,
but time has passed and humans have interacted with them.." The house in Pikmin 4 also seems
to hint that humans aren't as extinct as maybe we once thought. So what's the overall theme
of the Pikmin series? According to the clay guy Yamaguchi, it's a message that applies to
both the game world and the players' real lives. "Even in a world as cruel as this,
you can't give up on living." But what does the big cheese Miyamoto think? In the September 2001
issue of Nintendo Online Magazine, he said "On screen, Pikmin are constantly born and constantly
dying. It’s a deep game that really understands how the world is a cycle of life and death." An
existential game with a determined undertone -- that's the philosophy the Pikmin team wants
you to take away, especially after the game's turned off and you walk outside to touch grass.
Now we’re gonna take a look at something that drums up a little less existential
dread -- some newly translated facts about Mario Party 4. The info here comes from Nintendo Online
Magazine’s December 2002 issue, which has an interview all about Mario Party 4. Joining
this time is the director of every Mario Party game up to this point, Kenji Kikuchi,
as well as mini-game director Shuichiro Nishiya, mini-game designer Daisuke Takeuchi, Art Design
Director Yukinori Goto, and project coordinators Hiroshi Sato and Miyuki Hirose. Right off the bat,
Kikuchi brings up how he never intended for Mario Party to become a series. It seems there were tons
of ideas the devs had left over from the first game, so they pushed to make a sequel. Now here we
are, 25 years and 18 games later. Mario Party 4’s biggest change to the series was the entire game
would now be 3D -- so no 2D game boards. Early Mario Party titles on N64 had flat 2D game boards,
but the power of the GameCube meant they could do fully 3D boards, and this drove much of the
devs thinking during production. To emphasize this, they wanted to add one dynamic 3D element
to each board, which led to the inclusion of the roller coaster in Toad’s Midway Madness.
Mario Party 4 also introduces a mechanic where players can change their character’s
size to either tiny or gigantic using Mini or Mega Mushrooms. According to Daisuke Takeuchi,
originally, when characters ate Mega Mushrooms, they’d become so big that
their models were completely enveloping the board spaces. And conversely,
according to Yukinori Goto, he wanted to make the tiny characters so small that
you couldn't even see the models on the board. But they realized that was a pretty bad idea,
so they made the characters actually visible. The team’s approach to mini-games was just as bold.
They went and asked every single member of staff at the company, regardless of job title or rank,
to come up with ideas for mini-games. Many submitted full explanations of how a mini-game
should work, but others just sent in simple doodles, or sometimes even just a one line memo.
And once all the ideas were collected, it fell to Takeuchi to decide which mini-games to make. Some
games came with highly specific requests, like in the case of the swimming mini-game Mario Medley,
where staff asked him to use the same camera angles as Olympic swimming. So Takeuchi went out
and rented a video tape of the Olympics and asked the devs working on it to recreate what they saw
on the tape. At this point in the interview the devs are asked about a fan favorite mini-game,
Booksquirm, and how they came up with it. According to Kikuchi, he just wanted to
try making it from a technical standpoint, saying it’s the kind of game you just have
to make and see how it feels to have the pages falling down on you before you know it works.
While all the devs are talking about mini-games, Goto brings up a pretty big element of the game
that got left on the cutting room floor. He said: “We added in a lot of small objects
since the GameCube can display them well and we wanted to make use of that ability. At
the first stage of planning we had an idea to make the whole board a giant dollhouse,
and what’s left of that idea became the present room.” The Present Room’s where players can look
at what they’ve won in the game's Story Mode, and it’s pretty easy to see how all these designs
might’ve once been part of a big doll house game board. And just as a quick aside here,
the description of Daisy’s side table in the Present Room tells players not to peek at her
journal. But if you wanna ignore that bit of advice, you’ll see that her journal is actually
a Japanese copy of Mario Party 2. Another unique room in Mario Party 4 is the Extra Room. Takeuchi
says the Extra Room is where "substandard mini-games" go, and it came about after the
team made the Beach Volley Folly mini-game. It was so fun and engrossing that the devs would end up
completely forgetting the game even had a board, and the matches’d go on for ages. This is what
Takeuchi meant by “substandard”, because it didn’t fit the requirements for a Mario Party mini-game,
which needed to be short and sweet. But they didn’t wanna just throw the game away,
so they made the Extra Room for mini-games that could go on for a while. Project coordinator
Hiroshi Sato believes that before they added in the Extra Room, the game wasn’t up to snuff.
They already had the tiny-huge size changing mechanic and a bunch of other unique features,
but the Extra Room was the final touch that made the game worthy of the title ‘Mario Party 4’.
Back in our ‘New N64 Fact Discovered’ video, a lot of folks really loved the insight and
work ethic of Shugo and Hiroyuki Takahashi and their work on the Mario sports games. So today
we’re delving into another interview with the duo all about the development of Mario Golf:
Toadstool Tour. The interview’s from Nintendo Online Magazine’s September 2003 issue,
and features the Takashis alongside sound director Masaaki Uno, and game coordinators Toshiharu Izuno
and Kenichi Nishida. The article opens up with Hiroyuki talking about how one of the reasons
they wanted to make Toadstool Tour was that the GameCube basically didn’t have any “fully-fledged”
sports titles at the time. But they also wanted to right some wrongs with Mario Golf on the
N64. They were super confident in Mario Golf, and thought families would enjoy playing it together,
but that didn’t quite work out. After Mario Golf came out on N64, Hiroyuki saw children playing
it in the toy section of a department store. But to his dismay, the kids just couldn’t figure out
how to play it properly. This is why Toadstool Tour has the auto shots -- where the player taps
the A button to determine the power, then the computer handles the rest. In fact,
all the shots in the game can be performed by just pressing combinations of A or B, simplifying
even technical shots. Apparently this system took about half a year to think up and refine through
trial and error. The overall goal for Toadstool Tour was to make a golf game that captured the
essence of Mario, encouraged families to play together, and was user-friendly for beginners.
But they needed to provide enough depth for enthusiasts and avoid leaning too heavily
into fantasy, fearing that might detract from the golfing experience. However,
they also thought if they made everything realistic it’d strip away the Mario essence,
so a lot of consideration went into harmonizing these elements. At one point, Shugo tried pulling
in assets from other Mario games to see how they’d look, and recalls thinking it’d be a good idea to
use the water from Super Mario Sunshine, seeing as how it had great looking water for the time. But
when he put Sunshine’s water into Toadstool Tour, it didn’t fit at all, and he had to rethink his
approach. Masaaki Uno talks about how the struggle to strike a balance between fantasy and reality
seeped over into the game’s audio too: “If we used real sounds for when a ball falls onto the lawn,
it would get dull. So we tried using bubble wrap, and with the sounds of water hazards, we filled a
bucket with water and poured it on a glass ashtray in the conference room. Shugo and I spent a long
time doing it all by hand.” And they even show us a picture of the same ashtray in the interview.
The developers also decided to include jeers so that if it wasn’t your turn you could at least
impact someone else’s. Another reason for letting folks boo their friends was that Hiroyuki didn’t
like the idea of just taking his turn then staring blankly as the ball flew. He wanted everyone
around him to join in at every possible moment -- even if that means being heckled by other players.
He went on to say that when people think of golf games, they kinda have this static image in their
mind of a course and someone just lining up and hitting a ball. But when you golf in real life,
the environment is much more lively and dynamic. The team went to great lengths to make the
experience authentic -- so much that they even brought in a pro golfer to test the game. Just
as well, because some of the stuff had never even played golf. Kenichi Nishida told N.O.M. “I’ve
never played golf, but playing this made me think that ‘golf is fun, I’d like to try it.’” Did you
also know that Did You Know Gaming is making an actual game that tests your video game knowledge,
and that you can preorder it right now? For more on that, check out the video on screen.