As you can tell, reader, I get more mail responding to anything I put out about games. It makes me glad I have kept my Metroid views to myself!
You keep talking about Super Mario World being a decline from SMB3, but I remember when it came out and I was 11. To me, it was a huge improvement because SMB3 was just too darn hard. Sure, the NES had those two controller ports, but whenever I went to a friend’s house to play NES, I would just die and run out of lives within a few minutes because the games were pretty hard if you didn’t practice (I didn’t have an NES).
SMB3 was even worse. My friend wouldn’t want to play with me at all, because if I got a mushroom house, I would waste the valuable item. If I got to the airship, I would die and make it go somewhere else (and since I would run out of lives, the one or two levels I beat would become re-locked, often meaning someone had to re-beat them to get to the airship), aggravating my friend even more. SMW was a huge improvement for me. The earlier levels were not nearly as difficult, there were no mushroom or card houses to cause fights between the kids, and even better, you could go back to earlier worlds and “farm” lives. So while my friend was off somewhere in Chocolate Island, I was hanging around the first few levels, playing them over and over. It was brilliant! While he was busy beating the game, I was busy practicing on the earlier levels that I could handle. You couldn’t do that in SMB3.
So in my opinion, SMW exhibits some of those “blue ocean” values, as it had a lot of gameplay devices that made it accessible to people who got left behind by the NES. I know the SNES wasn’t as successful as the NES, but I never would have gotten into Nintendo games if it weren’t for SMW.
You’re getting it backward on the ‘blue ocean’ part. SNES left many NES people behind as games got increasingly complicated. No one cared at the time because there was an illusion the industry was growing due to population growth and increasingly multiple console ownership.
I’m discovering that commentating on Mario or Zelda, in any sense, is being perceived as if I am commentating on people’s childhoods. If I say, “Super Mario Sunshine did not help make the Mario series more popular,” someone who grew up with Sunshine might be offended by such a statement and email me about it. Now, I do not receive those emails because the kids who grew up with Sunshine are not yet old enough to email… If I am still around years from now and still talking about Mario in some way, I am sure they will eventually begin emailing me too.
There are three indications to me that point to Super Mario World being a decline from Super Mario Brothers 3.
1) The ‘Mario Madness’, as was called, was not sustained with Super Mario World as it was with Super Mario Brothers 3. Mario was increasingly becoming ‘uncool’.
2) Twenty years later, people still debate whether SMW or SMB 3 is better. Since SMB 3 is an 8-bit game, and there is a massive difference between 8-bit and 16-bit games, this tells me that SMW was a weak 16-bit title if it can even be remotely compared to an 8-bit predecessor.
3) After SMW, competitors broke through and stole Nintendo’s 2d platformer hold. During the 8-bit generation, there were many, many clones of Super Mario Brothers. None of them could hold a candle to Miyamoto’s work. After Super Mario World, that all changed. Suddenly, Sonic the Hedgehog was the cool platform game. Even Bonk had a following. So either the competitors got extremely talented very quickly or that the Mario series weakened to such an extent where competitors could break through.
Keep in mind I am looking at the Mario games not as ‘games’ but in the perspective of entertainment phenomena. Once upon a time, there was Mario Madness. It all vanished. Why?
It can’t be because kids got older. New kids kept following the old ones. Something else killed off Mario Madness. It won’t hurt our childhood to explore why it happened.