The origin story of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker doesn't begin with the tiny protagonist at all. In 2011, Nintendo created a bunch of prototypes at the start of development for the next Mario game. One of those tests involved diorama-like levels the player could twist and turn. Initially, the team of designers at EAD Tokyo applied the game mechanic they knew best to these tiny worlds.

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Unlikely Heroes

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“We introduced a character with the ability to jump,” Producer Koichi Hayashida told IGN in an interview. “But one thing we discovered right away was that if we played these levels with a character that could jump, we would have to make these stages very, very big, because jumping allows the character to go wherever they want.” By taking away this element of mobility, the designers could focus on making levels much more compact.Director Shinya Hiratake told Game Informer he later pitched the idea with Link from The Legend of Zelda series as the protagonist . Nintendo General Manager Shigeru Miyamoto rejected the pitch, but he thought the concept had potential. It just needed a different main character.Enter Captain Toad, an unlikely protagonist who's weighed down by a heavy backpack and a desire for treasure. He was a background character from the Super Mario Galaxy series but, most importantly, he cannot jump. It was the right fit for this style of game.“At the time, we considered this style of gameplay could be a game in and of itself,” Hayashida said “but we cut it off right there and introduced it as a couple of levels in Super Mario 3D World.” The team inserted six puzzle stages, a sort of mini side quest to collect more stars, which was called The Adventures of Captain Toad.Development for a standalone game started after the launch of SM3DW thanks to Miyamoto, since the core idea linked to a similar concept from his past. “He’s a fan of the Rubik cube,” Hayashida said. “And at one point he was thinking about implementing a Rubik cube-style of gameplay into a video game.” When Miyamoto saw what the team accomplished, he suggested they make Captain Toad into its own video game.Captain Toad isn’t just a puzzle platformer spin-off set in the Mario universe. It’s also a story of a protagonist who’s afraid of everything around him. Producer Hayashida admitted this was a tough theme for Nintendo to convey without words, but Director Hiratake constantly lobbied for the team to convey the main character’s personality as much as possible up until the end of development.With a GamePad in hand, Hiratake enthusiastically showed us how Captain Toad could get dizzy and fall over from spinning in place. You could hear brief yips or worried noises as he ran away from enemies. “It may not have anything to do with gameplay or with getting from the beginning to end of the adventure,” he said, “but I really wanted to put in as many reactions that highlight who Captain Toad is.”Even boss fights embraced this thinking: In a battle with Dragadaan, a fearsome red dragon, the team re-designed the whole encounter around Captain Toad winning through a series of accidents. "All he's really trying to do is make it to the Star at the end of the level," Hiratake said. "He's not brave enough to face the enemy head-on."Hayashida credits Miyamoto as inspiration for this idea. Miyamoto felt it was odd for Captain Toad to fight a boss and try to defeat it in direct combat. "He explained it with the image of the Dragon enemy as if it were in a huge bathtub full of lava," Hayashida explained. "Captain Toad accidentally pulls the plug at the bottom of the tub, and all the lava drains out. And the dragon is naked and gets embarrassed. That sort of conversation took place."Originally, Captain Toad was the only playable character, with Toadette only appearing at the start before a giant bird takes her away. But, during the course of development, this approach changed as the game shifted to an episodic format. The team decided to experiment by changing the playable character at some point in the adventure to see how it would feel.Hayashida clarified that the decision to include Toadette wasn’t because of a trend within Nintendo to present more female characters in its video games. “I don’t know that we really thought about it in that way,” he explained. Instead, the team approaches the idea from a gameplay perspective each time: “How can we create some different rhythms in the gameplay? We need characters with different abilities than the characters we’d been using. OK, then let’s look at the characters we have not had as playable to date. It just so happens a lot of those characters are female.”Captain Toad started as an experiment for Nintendo, one that introduced a different style of gameplay and a protagonist that was very different from Mario. "We worked on the Mario games and, of course, Mario is the epitome of the strong hero," Hayashida said. "He jumps, avoids attacks, and defeats all comers. He doesn't flinch from battle at all. For us to then go and create levels for a character like Captain Toad, who is the antithesis of that, was a big challenge for us."

Jose Otero is an Associate Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat . You can follow him on Twitter