Miyamoto explains why Luigi is green and more

Rolling Stone sits down with the affable Nintendo designer

GameSpot? Time? New York Times? And now Rolling Stone? Everyone wants a piece of Shigeru Miyamoto! If he’s so willing to speak to anyone and everyone, why hasn’t he spoken to us yet? We need to arrange a pow-wow as soon as possible!

Though Rolling Stone’s feature is titled “Shigeru Miyamoto Shares Nintendo Secrets,” a lot of the information within is stuff we are already familiar with. There’s talk of “The Year of Luigi” and both released and upcoming games like Nintendo Land, Luig’s Mansion: Dark Moon, and Pikmin 3. I guess this is a more of a primer for the magazine’s gamer-lite audience than any hard-hitting investigation into the mind of Nintendo’s ageless wonder.

Nevertheless, the are a few nuggets that you might not have heard previously, such as the reason why Luigi is green. While developing the original Mario Bros. arcade game, the team ran into technical problems: “One of those constraints was that because of memory limitations, the second character had to be identical to the first character in appearance. And so we looked at that and said, ‘Well even if we have the same character, we could potentially change the color of the character.’ But again we were limited in the color palettes — we didn’t have much in the way of additional colors that we could use. And so we looked at the turtles in that game. Their heads are sort of skin-toned, their shells are green, so what we could do is we could use the color palette from the turtle on this character.” So Luigi was green because the “Shellcreepers” were green, and since he and Mario looked the same, “[o]bviously they must be twins.”

Hit the link below to find other tidbits, such as how Miyamoto used Flipnote Studio on DSi to draft pre-game intro movies.

Shigeru Miyamoto Shares Nintendo Secrets [Rolling Stone]