How Nintendo comes up with ideas for Mario's power-ups

Gamers are always asking "How do they come up with this stuff?" Now we have an idea.

In the latest issue of Game Informer, Nintendo's Takashi Tezuka was asked how the Big N comes up with ideas for power-ups in Mario games. His answer revealed that the Mario team actually creates levels first and then comes up with items afterwards.

Tezuka: “That’s a difficult task for us. Every time we work on a new Mario title, that’s one of the things that we’re always wondering about and talking about with the team. What we do is, we look at the courses. As we’re playing through the courses, we think, ‘What would be a good power-up or a good ability for Mario to have on this course?’ Then we build some of them and try them out and see if it worked or didn’t work. With a Mario game, what you really need to ensure is that those abilities or power-ups work on many different courses. Because of the number of courses, you want to make sure that it’s not, ‘It works well here, but maybe not on these other 20.’ That’s sort of the process by which we go about looking at which power-ups to revisit or whether we want to bring in new ones.

He also explained that Mario's Flying Squirrel Suit underwent some evolution during development.

Tezuka: “For this iteration of New Super Mario Bros., we have the flying squirrel. If you notice, if you shake the Wii remote while he’s gliding you’ll actually boost and get a little bit of elevation. That wasn’t the original idea; that’s something we added as we were going through development and realized it would be a good addition to the fundamental feature of the flying squirrel Mario.”

Source: Game Informer via Nintendo Everything


For those of you who haven't seen them yet, there is a video overview along with 14 minutes of gameplay footage after the break.




If you are interested, here's the detail page for New Super Mario Bros. U on Amazon.