A Mario dev burned the handmade diorama he used to pitch a Zelda game because Shigeru Miyamoto said no: “It was such a bad memory that I decided to let it die”
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker originally wasn’t supposed to be a Mario spin-off – instead, it was meant to be a Legend of Zelda game. That fact was well publicized in the wake of Captain Toad’s launch, but one more notable detail has emerged in a recently translated interview: the dev working on the concept was so distraught by Shigeru Miyamoto shooting down the Zelda concept that he burned the diorama he built by hand to sell the idea.
The basic gameplay format of Captain Toad started as a simple prototype at Nintendo. As in the final game, you’d slowly explore as a tiny character from a distant perspective, solving puzzles and finding collectables in a diorama-style environment. The concept was born within the Super Mario 3D World team, but the devs quickly realized that Mario himself was a poor fit for it.
“The thing we noticed was that if Mario could jump, the stages become pretty big, so we wondered whether it would be possible to make a game with a character who can’t jump,” according to 3D World director Koichi Hayashida. He was speaking in a 2015 interview with Nintendo Dream magazine, which has only recently been translated for a new Did You Know Gaming video.
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So, 3D World level designer Shinya Hiratake “submitted an idea to Mr. Miyamoto, the father of both Super Mario and Zelda, to use Link as the character,” Hayashida explained. To sell the idea, Hiratake spent painstaking hours in his off time to build a Zelda-themed diorama that he’d present to Miyamoto.
Miyamoto loved the diorama – but he thought it was an idea for a physical toy to be sold in stores. Once he realized the pitch was for a video game, Miyamoto shut down the idea. “If Hiratake had given a better presentation,” Hayashida says, “there’s a chance it would have been a different game with Zelda instead.”
As for the diorama itself, Hiratake says, “I burned it. It was such a bad memory that I decided to let it die.”
Eventually, the devs realized Captain Toad could be the protagonist for diorama-style levels as bonus stages within Super Mario 3D World, and they proved to be one of the best parts of that game. They even impressed Miyamoto, who suggested the devs spin off the concept into the standalone game Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker – which Hiratake co-directed. Hopefully that memory is a little nicer in hindsight.
