Mario Bros. was also a collaborative effort with Yokoi-san. He proposed that we make a competitive game and development started from there. In Donkey Kong, if Mario fell any distance that was greater than his height, he would be stunned and you’d lose a turn. But this time round, Yokoi-san said: “Why don’t we let him jump down from higher places?” I thought that if we did that, it wouldn’t be much of a game. But as I pondered it, I thought: “Why shouldn’t Mario be able to perform some super-human feats?” Then we made a prototype with Mario running and bouncing around and we realized that this was great fun. But at this point, we hit something of a dead end as we wondered what kind of game it was going to be. It was at this point that Yokoi-san, who is someone who considers problems from first principles, said: “Since we’ve got all these floors, why don’t we make it so that Mario can hit the floors from beneath, and defeat the enemy?” But when we actually tried it we found that it was incredibly easy. Before you knew it, you had no enemies left. And that made it a really cowardly kind of game. So then we made it so that you hit the enemies from below before going up to deliver the decisive blow.
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