http://shmuplations.com/mario64/
Miyamoto: ...An eternal theme for me with game design has been to let the players create their own vision... I want a game that allows players to try come up with their own solutions and playstyles and test them out there on the spot... One of our big development themes was letting the players move Mario around any way they wanted. We wanted to make a game where just moving Mario around was fun...
Our thinking was that as players got good at the controls, theyd want to try out more and more button combinations, and if there was nothing past the basics it would be disappointing for them. So we created movements for all button combinationsof course, that means a few useless ones got left in too. (laughs)... And yet, while we were all telling ourselves walking around leisurely can be fun too!, I have to admit that internally, I was a little worried
normally games have a faster pace... Truth be told, we did something with Mario 64 that we dont usually do: we had children playtest it... seeing [my son] try dozens of times, over and over, to get up this unclimbable hill, as a parent I couldnt help but think, Geez, does this kid have any brains? (laughs) Afterwards we asked the children what they thought of the game, and they said it was fun, and that they wanted to play it again. Up to now, I think theres been this image with games that if you cant beat it, its not a fun or good game, right? Thats a philosophy weve stuck to at Nintendo, too, but I figured that if a game was this fun to play even if you werent getting anywhere, well, it must be alright. Until this game, I was very skeptical about something like this being fun...
