When I was about eight years old, someone in the playground at school told me that if you crouched down on top of one of the colourful platforms in a certain level of Super Mario Bros 3, Mario would fall through the scenery and you would be able to run through the background of the whole stage, emerging in a secret passage at the end. I assumed they must be lying. Playground information about video games was supremely unreliable in the 90s, before YouTube playthroughs could show you all a game’s secrets with a single search.
But when I got home, I tried the crouching-down-on-the-platform thing anyway – and it worked. Mario ran right past the end of the level and emerged in a hidden room, where he was given a whistle that warped him to a different world. I was awestruck. I felt as if I had just found Atlantis, as if I had been bequeathed some incredible secret and it was now my sacred duty to pass it on. It is impossible to recreate that pure wonder that video games made us feel as children, when they were new to us. But Nintendo always tries. In Super Mario Bros Wonder’s case, its emotive goal is right there in the title.
Wonder is a side-scrolling Mario game – you run from left to right, bopping Goombas and collecting tinkling coins along the way – that you can play with up to three other people, different characters crowding on to the screen to compete for points and help each other over obstacles. It has Mario’s trademark transformations, where gobbling a power-up changes his form: the headline one here is a flower that turns Mario and pals into tubby little elephants straining out of their outfits and spraying water from their trunks. But Wonder’s levels also pull transforming tricks on you. Each hides a flower that morphs everything around you: suddenly you are a Goomba in a hat trying to hide behind trees from bigger monsters, or power stars start falling from the sky, or the pipes grow eyes and start worming around the place as you run along them. If you thought Mario was a bit psychedelic before, you should see it now.
“I’ve been creating side-scrolling Mario games for many years now, but the goal this time was to create a 2D Mario that was fitting for this day and age – with mysteries and secrets for the time that we live in” says Shiro Mouri, the game’s director and veteran of the New Super Mario Bros series. “The first Super Mario game felt full of surprises: Mario getting taller if you eat a mushroom, or discovering that you could go inside the pipes and be transported underground. As time went on, these ideas became normalised. We got used to them. So the development team took this on as a challenge … Until now I think we’ve been cleverly reusing our surprises, but we didn’t want to depend on that this time.”
Like other teams at Nintendo, including the one behind its latest hit Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the developers at Mario operate intergenerationally, with veteran designers sharing space with the youngest developers at the company. So Takashi Tezuka, who once drew out courses for 1984’s original Super Mario Bros on graph paper alongside series creator Shigeru Miyamoto, is still working on Super Mario Wonder. “Regardless of whether they’re new employees or very experienced, we try to have everyone raise ideas, and we develop our games based on these ideas – that’s the narrative we have for the Mario team,” he says. “There are times when I raise ideas and they’re rejected as well!”
Initially, though, Tezuka was not that impressed with the concept that his fellow developers put before him. “We came up with the idea that if you collect an item, you’re transported to a different area. When we showed Tezuka-san, his response was that the concept is still too similar to what we had before,” Mouri says. “And he suggested, what about making the environment you’re already in transform around you? We wanted to create dramatic changes within the same place, and that’s why we have things like pipes squiggling and moving around. That was the starting point of wonder.”
The 2D Mario games are works of stagecraft as much as game design. The peculiar arrangements of green hills and moving platforms and squat little monsters, the precise placement of blocks, hazards and coins, is all done to tempt players through 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 are fluent in the visual language of Mario – perhaps especially so. I genuinely did not know what was going to happen each time I touched one of those flowers; in one course I was riding a stampede of crystal-blue buffalo.
Just as Nintendo’s development has become intergenerational, so have its games; plenty of Switch owners now play Mario with their kids. Parents will be relieved to learn that there have been changes to the madcap competitive feel of previous multiplayer Mario games. You can’t pick each other up and throw each other around, or jump on other players’ heads, as my son insists on doing every time you play – and if you are a parent playing with a less experienced child, you can choose Yoshi and have your kid ride around on your back to get them past tricky levels. It feels significantly less chaotic.
“I’m not sure it’s less chaotic!” says Mouri, laughing. “I do think there’s a bit less stress … at Nintendo we don’t ever want our players to feel like our multiplayer experience is stressful.” Configurable characters and ability-granting badges help each player to calibrate the game to their own skill level, which helps when people of mixed ability are playing together.
“We’ve put a lot of thought into how it can be enjoyed by everyone in multiplayer,” says Tezuka. “I think one of the most important things we’re able to provide is that experience where you’re playing with your kids or grandkids and everybody is able to enjoy it. That’s something we really focused on and thought was important in this game.”
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It has been a bumper year for Mario, with his first blockbuster hit movie (Tezuka and Mouri politely demur when I ask for their opinion on the film, though Tezuka does tell 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 more than 30 years, says Tezuka.
“I think the play style of Mario hasn’t changed a lot over the years … It’s an action game where you experience joy from discovering how to become better,” he says. “As you overcome these challenges that we’ve set out before you, you can think about how to be creative with it, figuring out how to do it or what you need to do. In Wonder, we’re really expanding the options for players when it comes to how to go about that.”
Super Mario Bros Wonder is out 20 October on Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo provided our journalist’s flights and accommodation for Gamescom in Cologne, where this interview took place.
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