The Future of Mario
Super Mario Bros. has just celebrated its 30th anniversary with the release of Super Mario Maker, but where is the series going to go from here? Well in an interview, with TIME, series creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka offered a little insight into what needs to happen with the series now that Super Mario Maker gives players the power to create any 2D Mario game currently possible. This is what Miyamoto had to say and it confirms that he and his team are starting to work on a new Mario “we as developers feel that it’s time for us to move in a new direction, and we’re preparing to work on the future of Super Mario from here on.” What this new game will be has not been confirmed but it sounds like it will be something completely new, it would be interesting to see if they could innovate on the 2D Mario games to make something new that wouldn’t be possible to mimic in Super Mario Maker.
Miyamoto also talked about the future of Super Mario Maker saying that a sequel really depends on future Nintendo hardware because it would be difficult to deliver this type of game without the touchpad. He did, however, say that he felt user created content type games certainly have a future at Nintendo. In his own words, “as for the future of Super Mario Maker specifically, it’s tough to say. The big question is what would happen if for example we release a system that doesn’t have a GamePad? How would you adapt it in that case? What I can say is, we do feel that these types of editing software are going to be a new colour for us in terms of key product going forward.”
At the beginning of the interview Tezuka spoke up about how the concept for Super Mario Maker came to be. It actually started out as a Mario Paint game because Nintendo felt that would work well with the Wii U’s GamePad. Then the development team decided to port their toolset over to the GamePad to make constructing the levels easier, just like that Super Mario Maker came into fruition. In his own words, “originally we wanted to make a Mario Paint game using the Wii U GamePad. And that was where the idea originally started, but at the same time, we wanted to take the Super Mario Bros. toolset that we use to create the levels, and we wanted to move that toolset over to the Wii U GamePad to make it easier to create the levels with the touchscreen.”
In summary it seems that Nintendo does see a future in create your own level type games, so expect to see other variations of Super Mario Maker sometime in the future. Just imagine creating your own dungeons in Zelda or your own tracks for Mario Kart, Nintendo certainly has an abundance of franchise that would fit the Mario Maker mould perfectly. While Miyamoto saw a future in the Mario Maker franchise he was worried it would not work without a GamePad which indicates that Nintendo’s next console, the NX, may not have one. Also Miyamoto confirmed that he and his team are beginning work on a new Mario that will take the series in a new direction. Miyamoto and Tazuka reveal plenty of other information in the TIME interview which I recommend you take a read of.
