The Super Mario Bros Movie had no influence on the development of Super Mario Bros Wonder, according to an interview with the team. This was confirmed in the latest in a series of interviews on Nintendo’s site revealing behind the scenes information ahead of the game’s release.
According to the game’s art director, Masanobu Sato, the Super Mario Bros Wonder team didn’t know anything about the movie’s content during development. The only exceptions were producer Takashi Tezuka and composer Koji Kondo. However, the team were aware of the movie’s production and expected that fans of the movie were likely to pick up Super Mario Bros Wonder and didn’t want to disappoint them. This was a factor in wanting to make characters more expressive.
The interview also went into details about how the team achieved this expressiveness. For instance, Mario’s model is slightly offset because they found his nose would get in the way of his eyes and mouth when seen from the game’s sideways angle. Game designer Koichi Hayashida also revealed that the decision to give a greater range of expression to enemies influenced changes to course design.
“Since the designers had created fed-up expressions for Goombas caught in gaps, we thought we’d better develop nice gaps for the Goombas to get stuck in at the right time.”
This is the second interview with the Super Mario Bros Wonder team, with the first revealing that the team didn’t work to a fixed development time, allowing for greater creativity.
Super Mario Bros Wonder will release for the Nintendo Switch on October 20, 2023.
