Butt moves, pitches, and 9-Volt’s classic mini-games – We talk to WarioWare’s CEO
During the holiday season, we’ll be republishing some of the best articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our campaign. Best of 2024 series. Enjoy!
While super mario The series can get pretty weird with its lore, world design, and general concepts, nothing beats the sheer absurdity of this series. WarioWare commercial franchise. How many games are out there that let you pick someone’s nose, perform dental work, and have a back-scratching contest with Mario? While on paper these activities may seem like the last things you’d want to spend your craved gaming time on, they’re masterfully executed and fun to play.
For decades, we’ve wondered how the people at Intelligent Systems and Nintendo came to create the minigames that make up the WarioWare series. Where do these ideas come from? How much is left on the drawing board? Where did people start developing so many different micro-projects? To get the answer, we recently had the chance to chat with Goro Abewho is more than just the Director of the latest game WarioWare: Move it!but was involved with the series almost exclusively as a programmer, designer, and director from the beginning.
The Nintendo Life: WarioWare microgame has always been wild, wacky, and vastly different from its sequel. How did the team go about creating and conceptualizing these mini-games?
Goro Abe: We started by gathering ideas for mini-games from employees across the company, all of whom had different roles and responsibilities. We decided on Form types (to a certain extent) from the beginning [of WarioWare: Move It!]but that’s the only restriction we apply. Otherwise, we’ll let everyone’s imagination run wild. I choose the best ideas, allowing for a variety of themes and gameplay styles. WarioWare: Move it! There are 223 types of mini-games including boss games, but at the initial idea stage we collected over 1,000 ideas.
Can you walk us through the process of a mini-game from start to finish? We imagine the demo phase alone will be quite fun!
GA: Once we have rough ideas for the game, the planner and director will solidify the specifics. An artist and programmer will then be assigned to each mini-game, and that pair will create the gameplay. Generally, we let the artists decide the aesthetics of their games. Once the game is complete, we track people as they play for the first time. If the rules are confusing or if their inputs cannot be detected from game play, we think of ways to solve those problems and make adjustments, then repeat the improvement process. advance.
In total, there was a team of about 80 people involved in producing the minigames, with different combinations of team members working on each minigame. That’s how we create such a rich variety of microgames.
For you and the team, what are the core principles of WarioWare minigames?
GA: First of all, microgame rules and controls must be intuitive, where any player can immediately grasp how they work. For example, the balance we’re aiming for is for players to be able to beat the game on the second or third try, even if they don’t at first. We also strive to make the themes behind each mini-game unique and suitable for as many different ages and backgrounds as possible.
IN WarioWare: Smooth movement on Wii and now WarioWare: Move It!, we also took it very seriously to make sure the motion controls felt intuitive with realistic movements and that they looked fun to the audience.
With the latest entry in the series being a sort of spiritual successor to Smooth Moves on the Wii, are there any mini-games left on the drawing board back then that are now possible with the Switch hardware?
GA: For each game in the series, we come up with all new ideas for mini-games, so there aren’t any ideas that come from Smooth Moves. However, come to think of it, the Wii Remote (the controller used for Smooth Moves) only has an accelerometer, but the Switch Joy-Con has a built-in gyroscope, allowing us to detect more subtle movements. You could say that the additional sensor has allowed us to create even more creative mini-games, such as those where we detect the player’s leg and butt movements in the form of a Squat.
Additionally, Smooth Moves is designed to use just a single Wii Remote, whereas in Move It!, we’ve designed it to be able to use a pair of Joy-Con controllers, which has helped. Help us discover a new way to play: two-player cooperative microgames.
