Nintendo Explains How Super Mario Bros Wonder’s Core Idea Came Together

gameranx.com:

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