You may be familiar with “Iwata Asks,” the official feature in which Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, cuts out the middleman and interviews his own employees. In this week’s edition he spoke to the team behind Paper Mario: Sticker Star to discuss their new take on the sub-series, but what he discovered may surprise/upset you.
Software planner Kensuke Tanabe revealed that the father of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, actually asked the team to limit the game’s focus on story. However, Miyamoto-san’s guidance was based on much more than personal preference. In fact, the decision to tone down narrative of Sticker Star is supported by Nintendo fans themselves. “With regard to the story, we did a survey over the Super Paper Mario game in Club Nintendo, and not even 1% said the story was interesting,” Tanabe revealed.
While this may seem like a ludicrously low percentage at first, take some time to think about the most popular gaming experiences on the market at the moment. League of Legends, Minecraft, Call of Duty‘s multiplayer–it seems that the largest crowds tend to gather around gameplay, rather than plot. As Miyamoto-san reportedly put it, “It’s fine without a story, so do we really need one?”
How will this effect the future of first-party Nintendo games? What does this say about the majority of gamers? Why does anyone take Club Nintendo surveys seriously?
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