Tadashi Sugiyama

Tadashi Sugiyama 杉山 直
Born	April 15, 1959 (age 67)[?]
Super Mario–related roles	Director, graphic artist
Years active	1983–present

Tasashi Sugiyama (杉山 直 Sugiyama Tadashi, born 1959) is a Japanese game designer and producer for Nintendo. His most prominent works include creating the Mario Kart series.

History

Sugiyama joined Nintendo's creative department in 1983, initially working as a graphics designer and game artist. He provided assets to several Family Computer games, including creating the designs for Popo and Nana in Ice Climber. He is credited as a co-director of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and has directed several other games since. He was also among the central designers for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube connectivity experiments, though many of these were not released in any manner. He was employed with Nintendo EAD between 2006 and 2015.

Sugiyama has contributed to the Super Mario franchise in a few ways. His first game in the series was Super Mario Bros. 2, by virtue of working on its initial Japanese build, Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic as a character designer. He later went on to co-direct Super Mario Kart; according to an interview, Shigeru Miyamoto had tasked him and Hideki Konno with creating a prototype for a multi-player sequel to F-Zero. During development, they noticed race tracks in the style of F-Zero – with long, straight roads – were impossible to replicate in split-screen display, and were limited to tracks with many turns in order to fit into a smaller boundary. As a result, they decided to "down-size" the high-speed race cars to smaller go-karts, which drive much slower comparatively. They tested character sprites with Mario as a placeholder, and liked how distinguishable he was, even from behind, resulting in the switch to the Super Mario franchise.

Sugiyama went on to direct or co-direct the following three Mario Kart sequels, and provided graphical assets to various other Super Mario games. His latest game in the franchise to date is Super Paper Mario in 2007 as a graphic supervisor.

List of Super Mario–related games

• Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, 1987 - character designer
• Super Mario Bros. 2, 1988 - character designer
• Super Mario Kart, 1992 - director, CG artist
• Super Mario All-Stars, 1993 - assistant director, graphic artist
• Mario Kart 64, 1996 - art director
• Mario Kart: Super Circuit, 2001 - supervisor
• Luigi's Mansion, 2001 - art director
• Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, 2003 - producer
• Mario vs. Donkey Kong, 2004 - advisor
• Super Paper Mario, 2007 - producer