This article is a repost from Jeremy’s Cohost page. You can find the original here:
https://cohost.org/Jeremy-Writes/post/3453170-all-the-mario-world
(This article was made possible by the tips from kind folks on ko-fi. If you’d like to see more articles like this from me, consider donating from my ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/jeremysignor)
The title screen of Super Mario Bros. 3 started with a curtain drawn over a black and white tile floor, eventually lifting to reveal Mario like you’d never seen him before thanks to a shiny new graphical style that pushed the NES further than it’s ever been pushed before in a Mario game. But look closer at the series as a whole, and you’ll start to see these motifs of the trappings of performance peppering the games, revealing a design style that Nintendo continues to use for Mario games that emphasize the performative aspect of the games, with Super Mario Bros. Wonder being the ultimate culmination of this philosophy. With Wonder, Nintendo has laid bare its desire to put on a variety show for the player, and even those observing the player.
Mario didn’t start out as a proxy performer, but his games did go out of their way to establish that they are a layer removed from reality. Super Mario Bros. stars a plumber who is transported to a magical kingdom full of strange creatures to rescue a princess. In this case, Mario serves as the audience stand-in on all levels as you witness the fantastical and dangerous elements of the Mushroom Kingdom unfold. In Super Mario Bros. 2, everything takes place in a dream, a show for the slumbering mind. It wasn’t until 3 that the series coalesced around subtle nods to theater, performance, and other media tropes thanks to its stagecraft wrapping.
But a curtain is not the only nod to showmanship to appear in the series. In Super Mario World, you see usage of iris in and iris out, techniques seen in television shows. Super Mario All-Stars, the four-game SNES collection that remade all the NES Mario games in 16 bits, the title screen features a darkened scene with Mario characters talking and forming a din of conversational noise until the player pushes a button, when the scene lights up. This is very much like an intermission in the middle of a play. The Yoshi’s Island spinoffs have a storybook motif. And Super Mario 64 has a lakitu following Mario with a camera on a fishing line to explain the game camera to players. At every turn, Mario dips into the language of entertainment media to ground itself.
It’s fitting, because the Mario series established the template for how platforming games would be structured for generations to come. 3 brought the idea of biomes to the forefront, building on the concept of themed worlds introduced in 2 to the forefront. World added little touches of continuity into a game that absolutely didn’t need it but was enriched by it all the same. The sunken airship level right before the final world was a callback to the airships of 3 while having a completely new feel thanks to the sunken ghost ship motif. The stage, as they say, was set, paving the way for Wonder to deliver on its own media inspiration: variety shows.
All games try to offer a good variety of different things to do, but Mario games began to embrace the ethos of variety increasingly with each game. Consider the numbered platform from Super Mario World that moves horizontally until the number on them counts down to zero, then they fall. Known as Count-Lifts, they only appear in Valley of Bowser 3 and are used nowhere else in the game. As we’ve seen from SMW romhacks, Count-Lifts have amazing potential that was never explored in World proper. This would become a pattern in Nintendo’s design philosophy, as they would increasingly create gameplay elements that would only exist once or twice in a game before moving on to something else. The practice would culminate in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, where every level is wildly different than the next, but more importantly, it solidified its showmanship chops thanks to how it presented new elements to the player.
In any good comedy or magic act, there are two main phases, before the turn and after the turn. “The turn” is the moment when the nature of a skit or trick fully reveals itself to the audience, a moment of surprise as the act morphs into something new that was always present in the background. This perfectly describes the flow of Wonder levels thanks to the Wonder Flower feature they all have. Each level starts with a different theme or gimmick that usually is in line with the meat-and-potatoes platforming that the New Super Mario Bros. series delivered. Then you find a Wonder Flower, and everything changes. The level morphs into something new that still sticks to the level theme somehow. Sometimes the way the player plays the game completely changes, or even the player character turns into something new temporarily.
The key is the surprise factor, but also in how big and splashy the Wonder Flower sections are. There are even several musical number flowers, where enemies will perform an actual song as the stage continues. The second level in the game, which features piranha plants singing a song complete with choreography, is usually where players will know if they’re on board with the game or not. It’s big, splashy, surprising, and yet goes perfectly with the piranha plant theme of the level up until that point. And while there are several actual musical numbers in the game, the thing that all Wonder Flower set pieces share is spectacle, new mechanics and audiovisuals that jump off the screen and stick with you well past when you turn the game off.
It’s useful to think of the musical numbers because that provides a mental throughway to the variety show metaphor. Think of shows like Saturday Night Live or The Carol Burnett Show, with their many skits and musical numbers. Though any one could be expanded upon to create its own show or act – think how Mama’s Family spun out of The Carol Burnett Show – that’s not the goal of these ensembles. It’s to dazzle you and leave you guessing as to what’s next. It’s not a coincidence that Super Mario World romhacks became such a hit on Twitch. Mario has always been as fun to watch as it is to play, and it’s thanks to the sheer variety and mechanics that elicit many different emotions – joy, frustration, good humor, exhilaration. Super Mario Bros. Wonder leans into all these things to create what might be the ultimate expression of Mario, one deserving of a curtain call.
