Iwata Asks: 25 years with Miyamoto's dev posse
by Ben Gilbert 
on Dec 15th 2009 9:30PM
In the most recent edition of
Iwata Asks, Nintendo prez Satoru Iwata gathers up Takashi Tezuka and Toshihiko Nakago for a thorough discussion of their time with the company, the many projects they've worked on and their 25-year-long partnership with Shigeru Miyamoto. Let's break it down: Takashi Tezuka and Toshihiko Nakago both started at Nintendo around 1984, helping to shape everything from
Balloon Fight to
Super Mario Bros. These guys were part of the team that developed
Super Mario Bros. and
The Legend of Zelda -- at the same time.
During the 10-page chat, a plethora of interesting tidbits are revealed about some of the game industry's most influential Nintendo titles. Did you know that
Zelda was initially designed as a dungeon game
without an overworld? Or, how about the revelation that World 1-1 was created last, after the rest of the levels in
Super Mario Bros., and designed implicitly to teach the game to non-gamers? The chat even gets into the lurid sleeping arrangements of Miyamota-san and Nakago-san while on business trips for
ExciteBike (spoiler: it's not that lurid).
