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. But before we get to Pikmin, a word from this
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Tactica -- available now on Xbox Series X/S, 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.
