"drama"

Wired News: What was your first experience with Mario, as a gamer? What was the first Mario game you played, and what kind of effect did it have on you?

Yoshiaki Koizumi: It was Super Mario Bros. I felt like it was a really difficult game.

WN: How old were you?

YK: About 21.

WN: So why was it so difficult?

YK: I didn't get really far at all in Super Mario Bros. because I wasn't really good at action games. The first time I played Famicom was in college, and I'd had no prior gaming experience whatsoever. Even though Famicom came out when I was in sixth grade, it was when I was in college that I borrowed one from a friend to play Super Mario Bros.

I realized on World 1-1 that I wasn't really good at it at all. I kept dying. And it was at that point that it occurred to me, what do first-time players think of games like this? You jump right in and you just die over and over again. I found it a little easier to play Zelda, because Link has three hearts. It's not like you touch something once and then you're dead.

WN: You say that you were studying film in school?

YK: I was studying film, drama, and animation. I did some storyboarding as well.

WN: So what was your original career ambition?

YK: I wanted to be a film director.

WN: How did that end up changing? Did you go straight to Nintendo out of school?

YK: After graduation, I had the opportunity to be hired at Nintendo, and I went with it. And when you ask, "why Nintendo," my first opportunity to play a Nintendo system was in college, but my ambition had always been to make drama. That was my goal: Having a character, in a certain kind of world, having him go through a series of actions to accomplish something, and creating a dramatic tension throughout that. And games seemed like a really good opportunity to create a kind of drama that you don’t find in films. It was very interesting. And Nintendo was geographically very close to my university, Osaka University of Arts.

Wired.com