It was a romantic Saturday evening when I told my partner the seven words every girl wants to hear: “Are you ready to test the GameScent?”
Super Mario Bros. Wonder almost featured a realistic Mario and surfing
21.03.2024 - 16:07 / digitaltrends.com / Shiro Mouri / Takashi Tezuka / Giovanni Colantonio / Nintendo
Last year, Nintendo brought Mario back to his 2D roots with a surprise new game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The critically acclaimed platformer was an instant crowd-pleaser thanks in no small part to its namesake feature, Wonder Effects. These power-ups completely transformed Mario’s world, letting its developers experiment with wacky ideas from wiggling pipes to singing Piranha Plants.
The notoriously secretive Nintendo has now peeled back the curtain on how those creative swings came to be. The company hosted a panel about the game’s development at this year’s Game Developers Conference. In it, Producer Takashi Tezuka and Director Shiro Mouri went in depth about how it built Wonder Effects. The panel included some wild ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor – enough to fill a sequel.
According to Mouri, a big part of the team’s original design vision was to call back to the secret-filled world of the original Super Mario Bros. Though Mouri’s first proposed twist planted the seeds for what would become Wonder Effects, Tezuka would push him to turn the idea up a notch.
“I thought about creating a new version of these secrets and mysteries,” Mouri said. “I tried making something where if you hit a block, a special item comes out, and if you take this item, you can go to another area. When I showed that to Mr. Tezuka, he said, ‘This isn’t so different from how it’s always been. Can’t you make it so that instead of going to another area, the environment itself changes?’ So I said, if I’m going to change the environment anyway, I might as well go hard.”
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Mouri would get to work on his first radical ideas for the game. He’d start by creating a wiggling green pipe that moved around like an inchworm. If you’ve played Super Mario Bros. Wonder, you might recognize that concept: It’s the very first Wonder Effect in the final game. Mouri shared his original prototype for the animation during the panel, which saw the pipe moving in an almost snakelike manner compared to the inchworm-esque final version.
Both that and a concept for singing Piranha Plants gave the project the spark it needed. The team would get to work dreaming up potential transformations. That task wasn’t just up to Mouri, though; it was a massive team effort that produced a staggering amount of ideas.
“It was up to everyone on the team to come up with ideas regardless of job title,” Mouri says. “Nintendo believes that everyone on the team is a game designer. At first, we asked everyone to write any and all ideas on sticky
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