The idea for the Tanooki suit [in Super Mario Bros. 3] came from wanting to put a tail on Mario. We wanted to use tail for spin move as an attack. But we thought, well, we've got this great tail now, can't we do anything with it? So we added a flutter motion was like a propeller... once we started doing that, it felt so good we said, well, let's just make him fly!
Takashi Tezuka (手塚 卓志, born November 17, 1960 in Osaka, Japan), sometimes credited under his nickname Ten Ten, is a veteran game designer at Nintendo. Over the course of his decades-spanning career, he has co-created, directed, produced, and supervised some of the company's most popular and cherished games and franchises, most notably in the Mario and Zelda series.
