The Making Of Super Mario 64 – full Giles Goddard interview (2001)

Giles Goddard, a front-end programmer on Super Mario 64, recounts how the game was built by a surprisingly small core team of roughly 15 people working in an open-plan Nintendo EAD office. Development began on SGI Onyx and Indy emulators before hardware existed, and early experiments - most famously a real-time, vertex‑morphing Mario face - came from such tech demos. Shigeru Miyamoto was deeply involved day-to-day, shaping animation, control feel and the camera by playing iterative prototypes; Mario’s movement and camera behavior consumed the bulk of design effort. Takumi Kawagoe handled the camera system, which underwent thousands of iterations and was regarded as revolutionary despite later criticism. Controller design went through many prototypes focused on the central stick, and the N64 controller and camera choices strongly influenced gameplay.

Concrete production details include Bob‑Omb Battlefield emerging as the first playable level in about six to seven months, artists improvising pipelines to get Softimage assets into the game, and much of content creation happening like a conveyor belt to hit a hard launch deadline. Legal and technical wrinkles appeared too: internal patents, worries about Sega’s camera patents, and decisions about boss levels (Bowser arenas being deliberately linear). In‑house Super Mario Club testers provided late feedback on difficulty, and Goddard stresses that movement and camera tuning, rather than big content rewrites, defined the project.