In a gaming industry that seems to engage in periodic layoffs, it’s often difficult for even popular game franchises to maintain continuity in their underlying creative teams, from one sequel to the next. Then there’s the Mario series, where every person is credited with creating the original. Super Mario Bros. in the 1980s, he ended up playing a role in the making of Super Mario Bros. Wonder just last year.
In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Wonder Producer Takashi Tezuka said it wasn’t that difficult to get this kind of creative continuity at Nintendo. “The secret to having a long-tenured staff is that people don’t quit,” he said. “For people who have been together for so long, it’s easy for us to talk to each other.”
That said, Tezuka added that simply bringing together a group of industry veterans to create a game carries the risk of not “keeping up with the times.” Really, for me, I’m very interested in how our new staff members play, what they do. play, what they think and what interests them. I think it’s really interesting to see what we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something.
Young and old
For Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the development team solicited literally thousands of ideas for wonderful effects and badges that could be game-changers across Nintendo. In doing so, the game was able to incorporate the perspectives of people with a wide variety of stories and memories of the series, Tezuka told Ars.
“Among our team there are people who maybe haven’t played some of the [older] “So I think these people became familiar with some of these titles. And maybe there was some inspiration taken from these titles that I’m not aware of.”
For a series as long as Mario, however, even some members of the relatively “younger” development cohort may have a deep history with the series. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri, who joined Nintendo in 1997, remembers playing the original game. Super Mario Bros. back in elementary school, and being “so moved and impressed by the secrets and mysteries I discovered in this game”. The wonderful effects in Wonder were an explicit attempt to recapture that feeling of being young and discovering new things for the first time, which can be difficult in such an established series.
Mouri also drew some parallels between Yoshi’s Island– where Yoshi could sometimes transform into a vehicle – and Wonder transformation effects that could turn the player into a slime or a spiky ball, for example. “That doesn’t mean we drew [direct] inspiration from [Yoshi’s Island] or whatever, but I think…offering surprises has always been a theme in our philosophy,” he said.