In a new interview with GameInformer, Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka and Shiro Mouri explained how the company truly broke the mold with Super Mario Bros Wonder.
Super Mario Bros, of course, defined the 2D platformer for 2 console generations. As always, there were other companies that made platformers first. But Nintendo had an idiosyncratic sense for game design, that was easy to understand, and managed to strike the balance to please both beginner and advanced players.
Nintendo, of course, doesn’t own the idea of a 2D platformer, so other studios would come up with their own ideas through the years. Sonic the Hedgehog and Castlevania Symphony of the Night would each create different trends that diverged from Mario’s definition of a platformer. In the 2000s and 2010s, US indie developers would introduce platformers with ambitious narratives and unique game designs, such as Braid, Limbo, Celeste, and Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy.
Nintendo seemed to be out of touch with all these trends, but their idea with the New Super Mario Bros series was to tap at the nostalgia older gamers had for the older 2D games, deliberately, as a literal interpretation of consumer expectations. It worked in the sense that these games continued to sell well, but Nintendo was also noticing their games had started to stagnate. And so they had been thoughtful about making a change.
Now, Nintendo seemed to have figured out where they were going to go. New Super Luigi U was an extremely hard platformer, and the last of the New Super Mario games. It seemed to draw inspiration from Super Meat Boy, which itself seemed to be the penultimate kaizo game. Kaizo games derive their difficulty in how they demand players follow a sequence of specific actions, sometimes including very challenging motions. This also seemed reflective of the popularity of kaizo levels in user created Super Mario Maker levels.
But, lo and behold, Nintendo found a way to do something completely different, and something other studios, big and small, hadn’t thought of. And yet, somehow, it all starts with the original Super Mario Bros, again.
Talking to GameInformer, Mouri said:
“I believe that the first Super Mario Bros. game was really a game filled with secrets and mysteries. For example, if you get a mushroom, your body becomes big.
And there are also pipes that initially seem to be just obstacles when in turn, you can actually go into it and access an underground area. It’s really filled with secrets and mysteries.”
Now the fact that the early Mario games had surprises to discover isn’t really new. But Mouri and his supervisor Tezuka realized that they needed to push it further, in this early phase of development. And that’s where Tezuka prodded him with the real inspiration.
Again, quoting Mouri:
“What we wanted to do was say – you know when you traveled down a pipe, you go to an underground secret area, and when you climb a vine, you go to a secret sky area – we wanted to create a new version of that.
That idea was grabbing an item and warping you to a different area. When we made it and actually showed it to Mr. Tezuka, he said, ‘Well, if you’re just going to warp somewhere, it’s basically the same thing. Can you just change the area you’re in right now?’
When I heard that, I thought, ‘Well, instead of just trying to transform one small part of the course, why not just go for the entire course?’”
Mouri came up with the first Wonder Effect here, the idea that the pipe would start wriggling, easily, like an earthworm, when you expected to just go through it. And then Tezuka pushed them even further, by convincing Mouri that they didn’t just have to do this with every level, but with literally every stage.
And this is the core conceit of Super Mario Bros Wonder. The Wonders that are activated by each Wonder Flower literally transform the entire stage, with new things to surprise and delight players.
Even Mouri wasn’t sure about this idea when Tezuka suggested it. In his words:
“I had to think to myself, ‘Are we really going to do this?
And I thought that because what that means – having every main course have that – there’s going to also be work that needs to be [done] because the gameplay experience is different once you touch the Wonder Flower and then when you don’t touch the Wonder Flower.
That means we have to do that for every single course, which is again, a lot of work. And hence, I had to really ask him, ‘Are we really going to do this?’ And he said yes.”
It’s somewhat poetic, then, that Takashi Tezuka has outlasted Shigeru Miyamoto as the longest lasting developer of Mario games. He was part of the initial team that made Super Mario Bros for the NES, and he was also helping supervise the New Super Mario Bros games.
It definitely looks like Nintendo has committed to the idea of drastic change for the Mario 2D platformers, the same way they committed to changing The Legend of Zelda to an incredibly immersive open world. Some gamers may be skeptical and just think it’s a quirky looking game, but there’s a huge chance Super Mario Bros Wonder will be the real game of 2023.
Super Mario Bros Wonder will be releasing exclusively on the Nintendo Switch on October 20, 2023.
