’Super Mario Bros. Wonder’ Is What Happens When Devs Have Time to Play

Here’s something you don’t hear often in game development: When the team behind Super Mario Bros. Wonder was in the prototyping stage of the game, it had no due date. “I wanted to prevent people from saying, ‘We won’t make that deadline, so that’s why we didn’t do it—we can’t do it,’” producer Takashi Tezuka says. For the game’s director, Shiro Mouri, it was a very clear, and very positive, sign. They did not intend to make this game halfway.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which comes out October 20, is the series’s return to the format that originated the entire franchise: 2D side-scrolling. Mario is trading the Mushroom Kingdom for the Flower Kingdom, where flora talks and special items can make the entire world tilt faster than a bad trip.

It’s been a decade since the last Mario game of this flavor, 2012’s New Super Mario Bros., and even longer since players grew accustomed to the play style Nintendo helped popularize with the very first Mario game. “When Mario first came out, of course, everything was new, so we really didn’t have to explain anything or convince people to do that play style,” Tezuka says. “We provided the game, and people were able to come up with their own play styles.”

But now, Tezuka says, that’s not enough. Old Mario games were about mastery, where players would have to try difficult levels again and again until they got good enough to survive. Now, the Nintendo team’s task is to create an environment where players have more freedom to decide how they want to play.

That freedom became one of the game’s two guiding principles, and appears in-game in a few ways. Players can choose which courses they want to tackle first, and even walk around the world map in some areas instead of being kept to a straight path. They also have a dozen characters to play, including regulars like Mario, Luigi, and Peach, and new playable characters like Daisy. While most play the same way, all four Yoshis and Nabbit are a gentler alternative; they don’t take damage, and Yoshis can eat enemies.