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Super Mario video games have always rewarded curiosity. It is perhaps this trait that Shigeru Miyamoto's series - now close to 30 years old - has valued in its players above all others, a tribute perhaps, to the designer's oft-repeated childhood experience of clutching a lantern in order to explore the local caves on the outskirts of Sonobe, the small Japanese town in which he grew up. It's also a trait that Miyamoto has seemingly passed on to his junior staff at Nintendo EAD Tokyo, within whose secretive, never-exposed walls some of the greatest video games of the past decade have been built. "One of our younger development staff told me that they wanted to know what went on when Mario entered a pipe," says Miyamoto, referring to the yawning green pipes that punctuate the ground in Mario games which the plumber has always used as a way to access secret sewers. "They were curious as you could never see what was going on in there." The result of the resulting philosophical debate between the team is that Super Mario 3D World features transparent pipes, through which Mario and his three playable accomplices - brother Luigi, princess Peach and her attendant butler Toad - can now be seen to slip and slide on their bellies, arms outstretched like diving Supermen.
On this cold October morning, the German sky a unanimous grey, Super Mario 3D World has inspired additional transparency for the curious. A handful of journalists have been invited to Nintendo's Frankfurt headquarters for a video conference call with Miyamoto, the game's producer Yoshiaki Koizumi and its director Kenta Motokura. The three men - without whom it is unlikely that Nintendo would exist in anything like its current form (and without anything like its enviable reputation) - sit coyly in a formal line-up in Nintendo EAD's offices, peeking over the fuzzy heads of three Mario plushies which smile unblinkingly from within cat costumes.
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