super mario bros marvel is a game full of strange ideas. Since magical flowers introduce some unexpected new elements once collected, players can experience everything from a bunch of piranha plants singing at the same time to Mario transforming into a pile of sentient goo. In fact, it had so many ideas that director Shiro Mori wasn’t sure the team could pull it off. “In the beginning, when I heard that we were going to create a magic effect for each course, and that all the courses would have different magic effects,” he told edge“I thought: ‘This is stupid. This can’t be possible.'”
It turns out the problem isn’t coming up with ideas. Nintendo developers brainstormed many potential abilities—about 2,000 of them, jotted down on sticky notes and placed on a large board in the company’s Kyoto offices for everyone to see.According to producer Takashi Tezuka, he has been working on the series since the original super mario bros., the game not only had a large development team, but also had an extended ideation process to come up with these different Miracle Flower concepts. In the meantime, no ideas. There was a time when Koji Kondo was the famous composer behind the iconic tune. mario and Zelda, throws in a flower that transforms Mario into a life-size version of him. “They have an environment where they can think freely and come up with ideas,” Tezuka said of the process.
They were able to narrow down the list by coming up with criteria that would actually work for the game: In order for an idea to work, it has to have some connection between the moment before the effect happens, and it has to be something that affects the gameplay. So purely aesthetic stuff, like the weird live-action Mario, doesn’t fit the bill. Maury also came up with a flower that would make Mario pixelate, but it had the same problem. “While it was my own idea, I ultimately rejected it,” he said.
Once the list is significantly whittled down, the next step is to build a playable prototype. To do this, the team was divided into groups, consisting of an artist, a designer and a sound artist. “They would create something, and then they would share the idea with other teams, and people would discuss it, combine it, add to it and tweak it,” Tezuka said. “The first idea wasn’t the one we thought was the best. It was the base on which other teams added layers, and that’s the idea we’ll use.”
Some ideas were simply deleted at this point. One example is turning Mario’s head into a giant 8-bit version of itself, but instead of pixels, it’s made of bricks… which enemies will then try to eat piece by piece. In practice, there isn’t much strategy; players simply run as fast as they can to the finish line before their heads disappear. Other ideas were changed during the prototype phase.
One of the earlier levels Want to know Mario runs on a herd of blue bulls running wild. In the original concept, the bull was a rhino that could crush everything on its way to the end of the level. But this turned out to be too simple and easy. “The idea was interesting, which is why we decided to prototype it,” Mauri said. “But once we prototyped it, we realized there were challenges.” So, as a twist on the Mario formula, the designers made the creatures actually knock over everythingincluding the flagpole at the end, further extends the horizontal plane.
reimagined ideas Super Mario Staples are an important part of the process, Tezuka said.although Want to know Like its predecessor, the game is very much a 2D side-scroller, but it also features a number of important tweaks to the formula. The map is more open so you can enter stages in a different order, and there are new badges that grant special abilities, allowing players to tailor the experience to their liking. Previously stable green pipes can now shake and move, sometimes without relying on gravity. “We really worked on it element by element,” Tezuka explains. “Do we need a 1-up system? Do we need a timer? Do we need all these traditional Mario things? We looked at and evaluated every one of them.”
keep asking what is Super Mario Even though the formula has been around for nearly 40 years, it hasn’t aged well, and gaming should be part of the reason why the formula hasn’t aged well – and how to do it. Want to know, Especially, until the end, he was still able to surprise people. While the plumber remains as popular as ever, with a hit movie and theme parks around the world, his outings seem to be getting stranger. Asked if an idea might be too outlandish, Maury said: “I don’t know if there’s a limit.” Super Mario. “I think it really comes down to whether the gameplay is fun.”