If you’ve been a gamer for more than the last five minutes, then I don’t need to tell you just how important Mario is to the video game world. IGN recently interviewed several people in the video game industry to find out just how important Mario has been to us over the years.
Megan Man creator Keiji Inafune stats that Mario hasn’t just been important to the gaming populous who purchase his games, but to the developers who make them as well. “Mario is, for game creators, the development bible. There are so many hints about good design, about cute characters, about innovation in using an existing gameplay system. It’s something you have to constantly look at and examine and take hints from as a game creator. It’s the anchor that grounds almost all games. I have total respect for Miyamoto, to the point where… It’s very strange that there are national cultural treasures – they’re traditionally sportsmen.”
With the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System literally resurrecting the video game industry from the ashes of the “crash,” it almost always stood up to its name…entertainment. At the helm was Super Mario Bros. , a title that, to this day, still gets regular play all around the world as if it were only released yesterday.
Other big names in the industry were also interviewed, including one of the creators of Gears of War , Cliff Bleszinski. He tells IGN how the original classic got him into the pages of Nintendo Power magazine; “…I was able to max out the scoreboard at 9,999,950 and I took a Polaroid (the original Instagram!) and mailed it to Nintendo who then printed my name in the Nintendo Fun Club and then eventually in the very first issue of Nintendo Power,” Bleszinski said.
Source: IGN