March 23^rd, 2003 (12:00am) - Nintendo’s master game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, along as The Wind Waker director Eiji Aunouma, had conducted an interview with NTSC-UK. In this interview many different topics were discussed (Though, mostly Zelda), but Miyamoto-san did reveal some new information about the next Super Mario game for the Nintendo GameCube.

“NTSC-UK: Was it more difficult taking Mario from 2D into 3D than it was Zelda due to Mario’s innate 2D simplicity?

Miyamoto
Yes, with the long history of Super Mario Brothers and Mario himself, we knew it was going to be hard now that Mario is becoming 3D. Taking a look into the many different aspects of Mario, some things were going well because of 3D expression, but on the other hand, as you just pointed out, Mario may have become a game which is not for everybody now. That kind of feeling is actually taken very bitterly, and with the public reaction to the latest Mario games, we are already starting to develop a new Mario game that shall be different in that sense. We’ve just talked a bit about what’s being Zelda-like, now what we think about being Mario-like is that the player has to enjoy himself just moving Mario. With the 3D expression, players can enjoy many more varieties of movements, but if we ask them are you really comfortable controlling Mario, I have to admit that not everybody appreciates controlling him now.”

For a second there it sounds as if he’s saying that he wants to create a Cel Shaded Mario game, if that’s the case, myself and a few others my be a bit disturbed, especially if the art style would go in a direction that we would be unpleased with (Like in the case of The Wind Waker). Though, you can’t really tell what Miyamoto-san means, for all we know he could bring the series back to its 2D root, but many gamers like me would rather not see that, but some others would. Hopefully, we’ll get are first look at the game, which has been known to be called Super Mario 128, at this year’s E3 in May.