I love Hino and I wish he wasn't stuck on New Mario / Mario Maker! Yoshi's Island and Pikmin show he's really talented.
Hino was so talented, in fact, that Miyamoto pushed him to start making his own games after he worked on Mario World visuals (he's also Yoshi's creator, beginning from some sketches by Tezuka).
From the SNES Mini interview with Yoshi's Island staff:
Sao:
How did you come to make a platform game with Yoshi as the main character?
Hino:
After development of Super Mario World ended, I had some downtime, and Miyamoto said, “How long are you going to be doing visuals?”
Sao:
What did he mean?
Hino:
At Nintendo back then, designers would just do visuals for a few years after entering the company. After that, it was generally understood that you would move on to become a director or planner.
Sao:
So Miyamoto-san was trying to say that you should stop with the art and come up with a project.
Hino:
Yeah. So then I entered a period of thinking up all sorts of projects, experimenting with them, and canning them over and over. It got to the point where I thought if the next project fell through, I couldn’t stay at the company.
Among these experimental games, there was probably "
Super Donkey", the canceled Donkey Kong game which turned into Yoshi's Island. We know about it from the Gigaleak. There are some common elements between Super Donkey and Yoshi's Island -- compared to traditional 2D Mario games, the main characters have a more elaborated moveset (the ground pond actually debuted on Super Donkey, though it had a dedicated button). This is probably because Hino thought that Mario World exhausted what traditional 2D platforms could do.
Hino:
It’s just my personal opinion, but I felt like, with Super Mario World, we had done everything we could with a side-scrolling jumping game.
Sao:
Oh, I see. After that, Super Mario 64 came out and for a while the focus was on more three-dimensional action and not side-scrolling.
Hino:
Right. I wondered what kind of side-scrolling platform game we could make and thought we could create new gameplay if Yoshi were the main character. I think I started with the idea of having Yoshi carry something to the goal.
Sao:
Making Yoshi the main character would give birth to new actions.
Tezuka:
Right. We made new actions, and one I thought was good was the Flutter Jump. Mario can’t do an action like that and it would help people who have difficulty with platformers.
Sao:
You wanted to make it enjoyable for people who were gaming for the first time.
Tezuka:
Yeah! So when you make contact with an enemy, instead of just bumming out, there’s a mechanism for not losing a life. We tried to think of new actions that would allow newcomers to enjoy playing.
During the N64 era, Hino likely helped here and there, even with unreleased projects -- the shift to 3D made people like him with CG background play a vital role in game development. Takashi had a similar background, and
in this interview, he tells what it was like to be a GC artist in the early N64 era.
“It was my first step, really, into game development,” Takahashi tells me via a translator, describing the explorative period in the mid-1990s when Nintendo was making its paradigmatic leap from the 16-bit 2D graphics of the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64’s state-of-the-art 3D vistas. Wave Race 64 arrived shortly after the Nintendo 64’s September 1996 debut, showcasing the system’s visual prowess by letting players jet-ski across astonishingly naturalistic waves, their plausible swells and dips made possible by a then-unprecedented custom Silicon Graphics chip.
“The reason I wound up on Wave Race was because of my work in 3D graphics,” Takahashi explains. “It all started sitting down with these engineers who only had experience with the Famicom and the Super Famicom [the Japanese names for Nintendo’s 8-bit NES and 16-bit Super NES consoles] and the 2D graphics there. We just plopped an SGI [Silicon Graphics, Inc.] machine in front of them and sat down and said, ‘How are we going to make something with this?'”
For the soon-to-be-released GameCube hardware, Hino and Miyamoto then went to work on a prototype called Adam and Eve. The game's theme was "watch the life" of some graphically simplistic characters, and play the role of God.
According to Miyamoto:
Depending on the decisions, they could make a nest and have children. While we were moving toward that theme, we faced a problem: What is the goal? The process got me more involved in the game. There was a kind of desire to control a big group of characters by using the newly developed C Stick. After a while, that changed into the idea of grabbing and throwing characters.
(read this interview btw, it's really interesting and Hino is interviewed too)
And thus, the game slowly morphed into Pikmin. The Bulborb originates from Adam and Eve!
Btw, I always thought that Pikmin is Yoshi's Island 3D, mixed with some elements from Mario World. When other Nintendo IPs went from 2D to 3D, the gameplay changed a lot, and if Mario World can turn into Mario 64, Yoshi's Island can turn into Pikmin. There are a lot of similar design concepts:
- In both games, the player attacks by throwing eggs/Pikmins. Enemies can be used to create new eggs/Pikmins;
- Pikmins have different abilities based on their color, just like the Yoshis in Mario World;
- Yoshi's Island levels had a lot of hidden secrets (red coins, flowers). The game is more focused on exploration than 2D Mario games. Pikmin levels are focused on exploration and collecting fruits/treasures/ship parts;
- Both games have limited resources the player has to manage: eggs and Baby Mario timer in Yoshi's Island (plus the health, if aiming for 100%), Pikmins, and limited days in Pikmin. Admittedly this element is A LOT more emphasized in Pikmin.
Imagine a Pikmin where Olimar is Yoshi, and the Pikmins are eggs/baby Yoshis. It would be Yoshi's Island 3D!
