Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s director, who is not the semi-retired Shigeru Miyamoto, and is in fact Nintendo veteran Shiro Mouri, has shed light on what his team were thinking when they came up with the out-of-the-box ideas for this game.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, this was what Mouri said about their initial train of thought in reinventing 2D Mario games:
“In terms of the concept for creating a new Mario, we came up with the concept of mystery and secrets
As we were developing more and more side-scrolling Mario games, the challenge became that these kinds of secrets and surprises were more and more normalised to players.
So I thought it’d be important to create a side-scrolling Mario that really fit the day and age that we live in now. You need to try harder to try and surprise these players.”
Mouri was in Nintendo long enough that he was the lead programmer on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. However, he is in a younger generation than Miyamoto, and Takashi Tezuka, who is a producer on this game.
That does put him in the position where he is intimately familiar with the Nintendo philosophy and process of game development, but without ties to their toymaking past, or even connections to Hiroshi Yamauchi.
So it seems that it would take someone like Mouri to decide to make 2D Mario platformers intriguing and interesting in a way that they had not been for some time now. While the Mario brand stays stronger than ever, and Mario sees a lot of success in crossover games, and also a variety of Mario centered games across different genres, 2D Mario games had been struggling if not financially, in terms of finding an identity.
As Mouri and Tezuka revealed in a separate interview, the Super Mario Bros. Wonder asked the staff to come up with ideas on how the Wonder Flower would work. Originally, the Wonder Flower was just going to warp players to a different place in the level. Tezuka himself pointed out that that would only do the same thing pipes did and wasn’t a change at all.
So they told the staff, regardless of what experience they had in Nintendo or in game design, to come up with as many ideas as possible. They ended up amassing something between 1000 to 2000 ideas, which they filtered down to what we have now in Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
It’s indicative of how Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s changes to the formula are more than aesthetic (more than elephants riding Yoshis), but in typical Nintendo fashion, still appear to be signature Mario. We’re all definitely looking forward to finding out what this weird new Mario game will be like to play in a month’s time.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder will be releasing exclusively to the Nintendo Switch on October 20, 2023.
