Toshio Iwai's journey from Sound Fantasy to Electroplankton
We profile the artist behind two of Nintendo's attempts at making experimental music games -- one a canceled Super Famicom game based on musical insects, and the other a Nintendo DS cult-favorite based on electronic plankton.
A year into his studies at the University of Tsukuba in the early '80s, a young Toshio Iwai began experimenting with film animation. As he sat, watching films and slowly crafting his own animation, he was struck by a profound comparison to one of his earliest childhood obsessions: the flipbook.
"I realized that making animation is expensive and takes a very long time," Iwai says. "I remembered that making flipbooks was so easy and instant. [...] I could hold the flipbook in my hand. I could control the speed of the animation. It had a weight and a kind of tactile sensation because of the paper. And I thought, 'Oh, this is a much more rich experience than just sitting on a chair and watching a screen.'"
Iwai's fascination with movement and interactivity grew as he worked toward his master's degree in plastic art and mixed media. As he researched bygone animation devices like the zoetrope and phenakistiscope, he found time to fiddle with the mechanics of popular arcade games and personal computers. Inspired by both, Iwai's Time Stratum installation — which used a strobing TV monitor to illuminate a spinning cylinder of printed eyes and hands — claimed the top prize at 1985's High Technology Art Exhibition, making him the youngest winner in the contest's history.
In 1987, his final year at the University of Tsukuba, Iwai hatched a plan with a notable Tsukuba alumni to design a video game. The result, the Famicom Disk System musical shoot-'em-up Otocky, didn't make waves in the gaming world, but Iwai was undeterred. He would go on to partner with Nintendo for two of the biggest projects of his career.
When I reached out about an interview for this story, I asked for an hour of his time. Iwai, now in his early 60s, wrote back: "Maybe an hour will be short for the interview." And he was right. For nearly three hours, we chatted about his experiences with art and games, and his turbulent relationship with Nintendo.