Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, creators of the video game
that was born to satisfy the desire to be ourselves the architects of the worlds of Mario, Yoshy, and the company. An original way to celebrate Mario's 30th birthday in 2015 and that helped us to learn about his curious beginnings.
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# ### From paper to computer (and the importance of minimizing corrections)
First you had to decide the dynamics and design of the game, the screens, the levels, etc. They did not have computer tools and it was all by hand: screens were designed and then everything was transferred to the database.
That's where the graphic paper came in, something we also saw for 'Space Invaders' with their original sketches. They first outlined the possible situations and characters as a storyboard in a movie, and later they used the graph paper to make a kind of template of what the programmers would later "translate" into eight bits.
As Tekuza explains, these sketches (properly colored) were the raw material of programmers and his was no easy task. In fact, on many occasions they could not see the digitized result until the next day.
Miyamoto comments on an important part of the process: the revisions and corrections. What he shows to illustrate it graphically are these sketches corrected in the purest teacher style, with red arrows on the drawings that sometimes left everything quite chaotic.
That's why this part of the hand-drawn design also got its big update. In order to make this clearer to the programmers, they began to use onion paper, so that corrections were drawn on it and the original sketch could be easily seen. Of course, the programmers came to warn them that they were not going to accept any more corrections since each one involved hours and hours of work.
I HOPE ALL VIDEO GAME LOVERS WILL LIKE THE ARTICLE AND SEE THAT TODAY EVERYTHING IS MUCH EASIER AND SEE HOW RESURRENT THEY WERE IN THE 80'S WHAT THEY THINK