Super Mario Bros. Wonder: Nintendo rediscovers the old magic of Mario | Super Mario

Super Mario

Nintendo’s Shiro Mouri and Takashi Tezuka Talk Mario’s Upcoming 2D Return

When I was about eight years old, someone in the school playground told me that if you crouch on top of one of the colored platforms in a certain level in Super Mario Bros 3, Mario would fall through the set and you could run through the background of the whole scene and emerge in a secret passage at the end. I assumed they must lie. Video game information was extremely unreliable in the 90s, before YouTube playthroughs could show you all of a game’s secrets with a single search.

But when I got home, I tried squatting on the platform anyway – and it worked. Mario ran right after the level ended and emerged in a hidden room, where he received a whistle that sent him to a different world. I was amazed. I felt like I had just discovered Atlantis, as if I had been given an incredible secret and it was now my sacred duty to pass it on. It’s impossible to recreate that pure wonder that video games made us feel as children, when they were new to us. But Nintendo is still trying. In the case of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, its emotional focus is right there in the title.

Wonder is a side-scrolling Mario game – you run from left to right, knocking over Goombas and collecting jingling coins along the way – that you can play with up to three other people, with different characters crowding across the screen to compete for points and help. each other over obstacles. It features Mario’s signature transformations, where gobbling up a power-up changes its shape: the title here is a flower that turns Mario and his friends into chubby little elephants that rip out of their outfits and spray water from their trunks . But the levels of Wonder also impose transformation towers on you. Each hides a flower that transforms everything around you: suddenly you’re a Goomba with a hat trying to hide behind trees to avoid bigger monsters, or powerful stars start falling from the sky, or pipes grow eyes and begin to move as you run. along them. If you thought Mario was a bit psychedelic before, you should see him now.

“I’ve been making side-scrolling Mario games for many years now, but the goal this time was to make a 2D Mario fit for our times – with mysteries and secrets for the times we live in,” says Shiro. . Mouri, game director and veteran of the New Super Mario Bros. series. “The first Super Mario game was full of surprises: Mario grows up if you eat a mushroom, or discovers that you can enter pipes and be transported underground. Over time, these ideas became normalized. We got used to it. So the dev team took that as a challenge… So far, I think we’ve been smartly reusing our surprises, but we didn’t want to depend on that this time around.

Like other Nintendo teams, including the one behind its latest hit Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Mario’s developers operate cross-generationally, with veteran designers sharing space with the company’s younger developers. So Takashi Tezuka, who once drew on graph paper the courses of the original 1984 Super Mario Bros alongside series creator Shigeru Miyamoto, is still working on Super Mario Wonder. “Whether it’s new employees or very experienced ones, we try to get everyone to come up with ideas and we develop our games based on those ideas – that’s the narrative we have for the Mario team” , he said. “There are times when I raise ideas and they also get rejected! »

Initially, however, Tezuka was unimpressed with the concept his fellow developers presented to him. “We came up with the idea that if you pick up an item, you’re transported to another area. When we showed Tezuka-san, his response was that the concept was still too similar to what we had before,” says Mouri. “And he suggested: how about transforming the environment that you are already in around you? We wanted to create dramatic changes in one place, and that’s why we have things like pipes that twist and move. It was the starting point of wonder.

Mario 2D games are as much works of scenography as of game design. The peculiar layouts of verdant hills, moving platforms and stubby little monsters, the precise placement of blocks, hazards and coins, are all made to tempt players and teach them as they go; everything in a Mario level is put there with intent. So these mid-level transformations are surprising even if you’ve mastered Mario’s visual language – perhaps particularly. I really had no idea what was going to happen every time I touched one of these flowers; in one course, I rode a stampede of crystal blue buffaloes.

Just as Nintendo’s development has become cross-generational, so have its games; many Switch owners now play Mario with their kids. Parents will be relieved to hear that changes have been made to the crazy competitive feel of previous multiplayer Mario games. You can’t get up and throw yourself, or jump on other players’ heads, like my son insists on doing every time you play – and if you’re a parent playing with a less experienced child, you can choose Yoshi. and have your child ride on your back to take them through challenging levels. It seems much less chaotic.

“I’m not sure it’s less chaotic!” Mouri said laughing. “I think there’s a little less stress…at Nintendo, we never want our players to feel like our multiplayer experience is stressful.” Configurable characters and ability badges help each player calibrate the game to their own skill level, which is useful when people of varying abilities are playing together.

“We thought a lot about how everyone can enjoy it in multiplayer,” says Tezuka. “I think one of the most important things we can offer is this experience where you play with your kids or grandkids and everyone can enjoy it. It’s something we really focused on and felt was important in this game.

It’s been a stellar year for Mario, with his first blockbuster movie (Tezuka and Mouri politely hesitate when I ask their opinion of the movie, though Tezuka tells me he recently watched it in a 4D cinema experience with his family, with smells and moving seats). But there are Mario design principles that have remained constant for over 30 years, Tezuka explains.

“I think Mario’s style of play hasn’t changed much over the years… It’s an action game where you experience joy in figuring out how to become better,” he says. “As you overcome the challenges we presented to you, you can think about how to be creative, how to do it or what you need to do. In Wonder, we’re really expanding the options available to players in terms of how to do this.

Nintendo provided flights and accommodation for our journalist for Gamescom in Cologne, where this interview took place.