'Mario' Creator Explores 'Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon'

March 24, 2013 — -- "Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon" releases today for the Nintendo 3DS, a lengthy sequel to Nintendo's short 2001 GameCube title "Luigi's Mansion."

In the new game, as in the original, Mario's younger twin-brother, Luigi, takes the spotlight, hunting through haunted rooms for spooks and specters with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back, equipped to suck up and capture creatures of all sizes.

In the second part of our discussion with Shigeru Miyamoto, we asked the renowned creator of "Super Mario Bros." and producer for "Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon" about what Nintendo is calling "The Year of Luigi," a year of games geared toward featuring the green-clad plumber.

Q: "Dark Moon" multiplayer features four Luigis tracking down ghosts with vacuum-cleaner backpacks. It has a "Ghostbusters" vibe. Are you a fan of the movie?

A: I am a fan of "Ghostbusters." That wasn't the inspiration for the original "Luigi's Mansion." In fact, when we were developing the original "Luigi's Mansion," we were taking care as a team, even though that wasn't our original inspiration, to make sure that people didn't just assume that that was what we were trying to do.

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Q: The "Luigi's Mansion" series is returning in 3-D while the "Pikmin 3" sequel and "Wind Waker" remake are coming back in HD. How do you make the choice between going 3-D or HD with Nintendo franchises?

A: Ultimately, it comes down to the decisions of the directors of the next games that are being made. Interestingly, when we were originally developing the original "Luigi's Mansion" on GameCube, we worked with Sharp on a 3-D monitor and we ported the game into a sort of 3-D mode that we experimented with. So when we worked on Nintendo 3DS that was a natural fit to then take that game that we had originally wanted to do that with and bring that into 3-D.

Similarly with "Pikmin," that was a game also when we created on the GameCube, we actually wished that we had had HD visuals at that time. Primarily because you've got so many small little Pikmin running around, we wanted the level of detail to really be able to express the characteristics of those Pikmin in a detailed way. That's why we wanted to do "Pikmin 3" on Wii U and in HD.

Sort of similar to that with the decision on "Wind Waker" in particular, the animation style of the original "Wind Waker," we felt that HD could really sort of breathe new life into that animation style and so that was the reason we went into that direction. Ultimately, there isn't a common reason across all the games they're basing the decision on. It really is which games are best suited to which styles or which systems or which features.