Did you know there’s a whole single-kart version
of Double Dash the worlds never seen? Or that movement of Metroid Prime’s morph ball was
based on a tire? Or Resident Evil's rocket launcher came from a terrible movie? For the
last few years we’ve combed through hundreds of foreign magazines looking for interesting
tidbits to translate into English -- and that’s where most of today’s info came from. We
stumbled upon some German and Japanese GameCube game interviews during our research,
all bursting with facts we’d never heard before -- probably because the info never made it
to English speaking outlets. So unless you were a frequent flier between Japan and Germany in
the early 2000s, you probably haven’t heard the stuff in this video. Today we’re gonna focus on
Mario Kart: Double Dash, Resident Evil’s remake, and Metroid Prime. But seeing as Metroid Prime
4 was recently shown off for the first time, we thought we’d start with Prime. This first segment
has some new info from our own interview with an ex-Retro developer, as well as an interview
from Germany’s N-Zone magazine in April 2003. Let’s take a brief look at N-Zone
first, which talks to Shigeru Miyamoto, as well as executive producer Steve
Barcia, lead designer Mark Pacini, and designer Karl Deckard. Early in the
interview the devs are asked about Metroid Prime multiplayer. Metroid Prime 2 Echoes got
multiplayer a few years later, but apparently Retro seriously discussed adding multiplayer
to the original Prime. Barcia told N-Zone, “When we were discussing development of the
game, we thought about all the options [like multiplayer]. But our focus was definitely on
the single player mode. We wanted to focus all of our energy on making this single player game
the best game possible.” The team tried to stay away from first-person shooter conventions in
order to differentiate Prime, leading to more focus on exploration. The interviewer also
asks if there’s any specific movies or games that influenced the team while working on Prime.
Barcia says the team took their cues from movies, intensively watching tons of different films while
thinking about how the game could be similar. He goes on to say “Also, any science fiction
movie with a strong female lead was a candidate for inspiration. For example, the Alien series
influenced us a lot.” Now -- this next question is why we really wanted to bring up this N-Zone
interview. The devs are asked if there’s something they’re particularly proud of in Prime, to which
they say the morph ball. Mark Pacini says it was extremely challenging and a risky aspect of the
game, requiring well-designed game mechanics as well as intelligent puzzles. Miyamoto even thinks
the entire game’s success hinged on it, saying “...if that experiment had failed, the whole
project would probably have been shut down. But it went well, and so we knew pretty early on that
Metroid Prime was going to be a solid project.” So, why did we want to talk about this point
so much? Well, because the guy who actually programmed the morph ball into Prime never gets
the recognition. Even after working on such an important piece of the game, Scott Johnson
was credited in Prime alll the wayy down here, as ‘Additional Contributors’. We reached
out to Scott to get some insight and ask him about his work on Prime. Scott was
happy to chat about making the Morph Ball, and told us “Mark Pacini was working with Miyamoto
and telling me what the design was supposed to be. He said they wanted the ball to roll around
like a tire because a person has a specific orientation [...] So I worked out with him that
they wanted it to primarily roll like a tire, but in some cases it could roll around like
a marble if the physics dictated it (such as when colliding).” Scott says he didn't have to
iterate on it much, and Prime’s custom physics engine handled everything pretty well. He
went on to say “but when [Samus] got going in a particular direction, I applied an aligning
torque to the ball that was proportional to the speed. That made her roll like a tire. [Miyamoto
and Pacini] loved it and it shipped that way. I implemented what Mark Pacini wanted. It was great
that he was able to articulate what he wanted.” Miyamoto said the entire project’s success
hinged on the morph ball working well, so why did the guy who made it all work get
credited in such an unspecified way after everyone else? According to Scott, he couldn’t
endure the crunch -- which other Metroid devs called a 'death march' -- so he resigned. He said
he had to choose between Samus and his marriage, and we heard similar stories from his co-workers,
many of which didn't make it to the finish line either. 'I resigned entirely [from Retro] because
I couldn't work 60 hours per week and then worse for months on end and stay married,' he told us.
'It was cultural in the studios that I worked in. I left Retro to work at [Electronic Arts] Tiburon
and they worked me even harder. I kept thinking that it was lack of planning or investment
that created the work hours but it was just the way things were and they were not going to
change. I ended up leaving games after only 18 months at EA Tiburon. I could not have two kids
and work in games. I was old at 35 years old.” Scott doesn’t make games anymore, but we wanted
to use this opportunity to highlight a former dev who rarely gets the praise they deserve.
Miyamoto said the morph ball was one of the most important aspects of Prime's gameplay, but if it
wasn't for Scott, Metroid might've had to crawl. There’s more GameCube facts coming up but before
we jump into the Double Dash and Resident Evil facts, a word from this episode’s sponsor,
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slash DidYouKnow’. And now back to the trivia. Next up is the Gamecube's Resident Evil remake
-- also known as REmake. These days you can find REmake on Xbox and PlayStation, but it was
originally a ‘Cube exclusive. Nintendo and Capcom signed an exclusivity deal to have Remake,
RE Zero, and the highly anticipated RE4 only on GameCube -- they’d even do exclusive ports of
RE 2, 3, and Code Veronica to boot. REmake would release first, and to promote it, director Shinji
Mikami and producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi sat down for an interview with Japan's Nintendo Dream
magazine. We had the whole thing translated, and a few highlights stuck out. Like Mikami's
perfectionism -- he says he went around Osaka game shops the day before Remake’s
release. Customers didn't recognize him, but all the shopkeeps were star-struck.
At one store they had a demo unit set up, but Mikami wasn't satisfied with the brightness
on the TV and fiddled with it to make the game look right. There was no TV remote though, so
all his twiddling ended in failure. He dropped by the same shop a couple days later to make sure
the brightness was how he wanted. From here the conversation shifts to Mikami's inspirations for
Resident Evil, and the stress of survival horror. Mikami said “Wanting to survive somehow, but being
unable to do anything against the enemy except run away is, I think, a big difference between movies
and [games]. If you ask me if that kind of fear's interesting in a game, I'd say no, so I made
it so you can attack the enemy.” He mentions one inspiration for letting us attack enemies
was the last scene in Jaws. “That last scene is a perfect balance of tension and relaxation,” he
explained. “The mast's falling so fast, there's no way to stop it, so there’s a state of [mind where]
the protagonist knows if they don’t act quick, they're dead.” Basically, Mikami wanted attacking
and running to both be options for the player, and tried to communicate that duality with the
game's first zombie encounter. So he made that first zombie stronger than all the others. “We
made it [especially] hard to kill," he said. "After [players] complain, ‘I can't kill it, I
can't kill it,’ they learn to run away for the first time. We spent a lot of time thinking how to
make players understand the essence of [Resident Evil] isn't just to fight, but sometimes you'll
need to flee [to survive].” That’s Jaws influence, but Mikami brings up another movie inspiration
we’ve never heard before -- that the reason you get a Rocket Launcher after beating the game's
because he saw the 1976 horror film 'Grizzly.' It’s a crappy Jaws rip-off about a grizzly bear,
basically, but the ending's a work of art. That scene right there's why Resident Evil gives you
a rocket launcher. "The giant bear's defeated with a rocket launcher," Mikami told the magazine.
"The thrill of blowing off zombies’ heads comes from Jaws, and the rocket launcher at the end
comes from Grizzly. I bought the DVD of Grizzly and said, ‘This is it, this is it, this is it!
A rocket launcher. No one knows this movie.’ Then I showed Grizzly to the dev team.” Mikami
also mentions how he really liked the Japanese TV show ‘Hiroshi Kawaguchi: Expedition Team’, and
though he wanted the game set in a western- style mansion, the show inspired him to give the mansion
some diverse outdoor areas. To get inspiration for the mansion's design, Mikami took a trip to Kobe,
Japan, where there's dozens of historical Western mansions built by settlers, some of which are open
to the public. Early in development, Mikami felt a western-style mansion would be a great backdrop,
but he didn’t care much for the real thing. Mikami said “At first I thought they were amazing. The
ceilings were 10 feet high and the doors were huge. [...] I was really impressed by the first
house and thought, ‘foreigners sure make things different,’ but after the second mansion I just
thought ‘okay I think I get it’ and by the third, I was ready to go home.” The interview wraps up
with Mikami promoting the Resident Evil 2 and 3 ports heading to GameCube, but laments that a
lot of fans thought the ports were also gonna be full-on remakes. The team actually just wanted
'em on ‘cube so if you enjoyed the first game, you could jump into the sequels without buying
another console. They literally say they don't care if the ports make money, they just don't
want new fans to have to buy PlayStations to experience the rest of the story. How kind
of them. Now it’s time for Double Dash. This next interview is from a different
issue of Nintendo Dream we had translated with a ton of developer insights. It features
key players from Nintendo EAD, the development division that made the game. Including
Double Dash Chief Director Kiyoshi Mizuki, and two of its Producers, Shinya Takahashi
and Tadashi Sugiyama. These 3 have all shaped Nintendo, but Sugiyama is kind of a legend.
He joined Nintendo in ‘83, and worked on every Mario Kart before Double Dash as well as Zelda
2, Mario 2, and F-Zero X. But enough back story, let’s get to the trivia. Early in the interview,
the conversation inevitably shifts to Double Dash’s two seater karts. The game was getting
an almost simultaneous worldwide release, so its name had to work worldwide too -- sounding
good while communicating the game's new mechanic. They brainstormed titles that included ‘twin’
and ‘tandem’, but they all sounded weak or forced. Eventually they thought up 'Double
Dash' and immediately knew it was perfect. But how did the tandem mechanic itself come
to be? According to Takahashi, Mario Kart is more of a party game than a racer, so the team
started thinking of elements that’d get players more involved with each other. The concept
of two players in one kart emerged, but experimenting with the core
mechanics of such a huge IP came with a lot of pressure. Mario Kart’s always
been a reliable system-seller for Nintendo, and messing with success could irreparably
damage the brand and Gamecube itself, so failure wasn’t an option. The possibility
of two-seater karts ruining the game instead of evolving it terrified 'em, so much so they
actually developed a whole single-kart version of Double Dash alongside the double-kart version.
They thought of it like an insurance policy, so if tandem karts sucked or fans hated it, they
could quickly backpedal to a more traditional Mario Kart experience. The single-kart build was
worked on all the way up to the final year before launch. It sounds like the reason it took 'em so
long to gain confidence in double-karts is because they were initially gonna have both drivers side
by side, kinda like motorcycles with sidecars. But they realized eight double-wide karts on one
track wasn't gonna work too well, with everyone bouncing off each other and disrupting the game
flow due to the sheer width off the vehicles. After trying out a few different setups,
they arrived at how karts look in the release version -- one driver in front of the
other. But that gave 'em a whole new problem: the guy in the back blocking your view of the
guy in the front. After using sprite-based karts in the first three games, this was
Nintendo’s first stab at a fully 3D Mario Kart, and they'd taken great efforts squeezing as much
detail as they could into every character -- so they wanted to make sure we could see them.
The fix they came up with was letting racers swap sweats on the fly. Double Dash was pretty
rigid at this stage of development. Characters like Mario and Luigi were forcibly bundled
together as a team, and you couldn’t mix and match other drivers. Director Mizuki said
they'd initially considered forcing characters to switch seats every lap. Quote: “At first we
had an idea of forcing a swap after each lap, but if we did that it wouldn’t be possible for
kids and parents to play together. [...] But we want small kids, grandpas and grandmas to
play Mario kart, which was a through point of our decision making.” The idea was grandpa could
cover the more difficult task of driving while a youngster raised hell with items. Letting
players freely mix-and-match drivers was a tricky ask, since in past games, speed and
maneuverability were based on body weight. When the team tried combining the weight of
two characters to define the stats of one kart, they ran into problems. Mizuki said: “At first, we
tested everything, like changing how karts moved based on the weights of the two characters,
or having a kart’s behavior change [...] when characters swapped. But if [the stats] only
changed a little bit, it'd be difficult to understand when actually playing. And when we
made the [stats] change dramatically, that made it feel difficult to play... so ultimately, having
[stats] change with the karts was the easiest to understand visually.” Producer Sugiyama had been
the visual director on Mario Kart 64. According to him, one of the goals for this GameCube sequel
was to achieve everything they couldn't do on N64. 64’s characters were just 2D sprites on
one polygon, pivoting on a single point. That made steep slopes and falls look awkward, which
is partly why 64’s courses were mostly designed to be flat. But with fully 3D karts on the cube,
the team could put pivoting points on each tire, resulting in dynamic movement that’d fit almost
any terrain. They were eager to test how steep a slope fully-3D karts could handle, so one of
the first courses they worked on was DK Mountain. Mizuki recalled: “We started making courses
from the Mario circuit. We went through them and talked about how it was ‘fun, but ordinary.’
We decided we wanted a bit more of an adventure, and started making that mountain course. But
once you’re making such a distinctive course, it makes you also want ones where you can
just do ordinary time attacks…” Their idea of an ‘ordinary time attack’ course was Baby
Park, one of the next levels they worked on. At this point in the interview, they drop
some deep Baby Park lore. According to Mizuki, the 7-lap track was inspired by the
2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, after he just happened to catch a short-track
speed skating event on TV, and thought an ice rink course'd be cool. Sugiyama says Baby
Park was also inspired by slick track karting, where a slick surface made drifting easier around
an oval course. The devs originally thought Baby Park would just be a test level, but they had so
much chaotic fun they kept it in the game. There was a lot of testing and tweaking on Double Dash.
The devs had to frequently adjust the drifting mechanic as course designs changed, then they’d
have to adjust courses to not mess up drifting, constantly tweaking throughout development.
One thing the team routinely tested was the game’s accessibility for newcomers. Mizuki
said “We were aiming for it to be something people new to video games could fully
enjoy. We gathered the kids and family members of Nintendo employees together and
had them play a development version. Then us developers took the parts that people didn’t
enjoy and revised them as much as possible.” From here the interview shifts to Double Dash’s
new items, like the Giant Banana -- which the devs say was pretty much made by accident. According
to Sugiyama: “It wasn’t something we were aiming for at first, we just made it bigger (laughs).”
Then Mizuki chimes in: “ …We were adjusting what the best size was for the regular banana, and
setting the numerics to the max just happened to make it get big. But we thought it was funny
(laughs).” Mizuki says the same thing happened with the Bowser’s Shell too -- it wasn’t meant
to be so big, they just played with the settings and after making it huge as a joke, and wound
up liking the result. They also say Mario and Luigi’s Fireballs were inspired by a scrapped
item that launched a scattering of five shells. The team tried it out, but there were way
too many shells on screen and it became a problem. It started out being a single
fireball the Bro’s could launch. Mizuki said “At first it was one fireball, but no
matter what we did it wasn’t strong enough, even when we tried making it explode or burn.”
But they thought back to their unused five shells item and gave fireballs the same number
and spread, and it fit great. Before coming up with the special Heart item for Peach and Daisy,
the team didn’t know what to give them. The devs briefly considered giving the duo quote “umbrellas
or something” for defense or to float down from heights. But they thought that’d be kinda useless
and probably just slow them down. This idea would be revisited in Mario Kart 7 where players can
use parasols as their gliders. A pretty unknown fact about Double Dash is that Miyamoto is the
person who pushed for the game to have 16-player LAN battles using two GameCubes. This pairs up
players 2 to a kart, with 8 karts on the track. 16 racers meant a minimum of 16 characters, double
the roster of Mario Kart 64. Originally the team wanted to include Donkey Kong Jr, and they even
made a character model for him. But ultimately, due to Diddy Kong being more popular, Diddy was
chosen for the game. Diddy’s model shares the same origins as his model in Mario Golf:
Toadstool Tour, but was tweaked to better fit Double Dash. Takahashi said ”Yes, the
original model is the same. Changes were then added to suit each game separately.” The team
mentions they wanted to add more characters, but they had to keep things trim in order
to hit their Christmas release window. Did you also know that tons of Nintendo
64 games actually never existed, but that there’s a few no one really knew about?
For more on that, check out the video on screen.
