super mario bros marvelThe titular flower can make a game weird, whether it’s changing the game’s stage or turning Mario into something a little scary. However, a special prototype idea can temporarily transform a game into a live-action one.
in development process Want to know, the game team spent an unprecedented amount of time prototyping its most important feature, Wonder Flowers. “Initially, there were no rules about what was a good wonder effect and a not-so-good wonder effect,” director Shiro Mouri said at this week’s Game Developers Conference. Some are very simple, such as when a first-year Nintendo employee simply wrote “Wonderful Quiz Begins” on a post-it note and nothing else (which later became the game’s trivia flower). Others are more complex and ambitious, but ultimately don’t work for the game.
For example, sound director Koji Kondo’s Wonder Flower idea turned Mario into a live-action version of himself—a regular guy who hummed background music and made his own game sound effects.
“As an idea, it’s very interesting,” Maury said. But ultimately the idea was rejected because it was difficult to see the connection between the flower effect before the miracle and the flower effect during the real-life miracle. “It’s hard to imagine how much the gameplay would change by making Mario a live-action version of himself,” Mauri said.
Although it is humorous, it may not be well received by players.Longtime Nintendo fans may remember the ill-fated 1993 live-action movie super mario bros.. Movie starring Bob Hoskins as Mario. No offense to Hoskins, but the movie was terrible (even he thought so) and solidified the idea that maybe plumbers in overalls would be better when animated. (See also: super mario bros movie.)
However, Wonder Flowers ended up being super mario bros marvelsecret weapon. Still, for every great idea, there are many that are discarded. More than half of Wonder Flower’s prototypes didn’t make it into the final game, including one that turned Mario’s head into a giant block that enemies had to eat, Mauri said. (The developers felt that Mario’s head was too big, there was no strategy to avoid enemies, and the mechanics turned the game into a mad dash to the end.)
Live-action Mario wasn’t completely scrapped, though. The team liked the idea so much that they modified it to create the game’s final badge: Sound Off? , which replaces the game’s usual sound effects with acapella versions. (Think: When Mario jumps, one says “boing,” instead of the usual sound.) “It’s a really interesting idea that would be ‘mottonai’ (wasted) if it wasn’t used,” Maury explain. What sound does the player hear when using this badge? That’s Kondo, of course.