For those of you (and myself included) that weren’t aware, SIJM is going on right now. That’s le Sommet international du jeu de Montreal, another annual gaming conference which is happening today and tomorrow.

The Nintendo keynote was delivered by Yoshiaki Koizumi. It’s a name you might or might not recognise, but he has an impressive resume, including head game director for everyone’s current favourite game, Super Mario Galaxy. Gamasutra has posted a summary of his speech, which is a very fascinating read, so y’all’d better check it out. He talks about the challenges of bringing Mario, and platforming in general, into the 3D world, as well as going into detail about the ideas that made Galaxy what it is.

“The concept was to play with Mario running around on spherical objects – something Miyamoto had come up with 5 years before, and something I came up with too. Why spherical worlds… What distinctive features attracted us to spherical worlds? Was it just because they were novel?…”

Read it yourself to find out!