Miyamoto was concerned about Super Mario Odyssey before its reveal

Everyone knows that Shigeru Miyamoto is the father of Mario and more, but it seems that even after 30+ years of game creation he can still doubt himself. In an interview with IGN, the legendary game creator has admitted that he was not sure how players would react to New Donk City, you know with the life sized humans and what not.

I was worried about how players would react to being in a world where Mario is this tall and normal people are a little bit taller. Or the fact that people don’t get mad at Mario when he’s jumping up and down all over the place. But with all that said, I think I realized that the character Pauline has already existed, and the idea of this game taking place in the city worked out really well. And so we ran with it.

But that was not all, when asked about how he decides what characters to use for a game, he stated it comes down to the game mechanics being used.

I really start with the game mechanic, and then trying to make sure that the character that gets put into the game fits that mechanic. If you divide things into large categories, you could go the Mario route or the Zelda route. And then, for example, with a game like Luigi’s Mansion, I really thought that Luigi was the perfect fit for that game, and that’s how it manifested. And for characters like Pikmin, for the mechanic that current Pikmin games have, they were perfect.

Adding on to that, he also stated the appeal of getting Mario into a new game

Fundamentally, I think that it’s ideal if we can get old characters to do new things. When there is a new game mechanic introduced and there’s a new character that really, really fits well, I think it’s great. But I do have a little bit of hesitancy and resistance when someone’s trying to overbearingly bring their thoughts in, and trying to create new characters over and over again.
As a child I wanted to be a manga artist, and as a manga artist usually you have this symbolic character that’s yours. And you try to use that character in many different stories and episodes that you create, almost like how Hitchcock is in every one of his movies. For me, Mario is that, and I want to create as many different games as possible using Mario. And I still think there’s a lot of potential and possibility left.

The entire interview is worth having a read of and of course Super Mario Odyssey is a game you need to play as soon as you can, it has won a lot of E3 awards and of course, we have also played the game.