“What I don’t understand is why there is this massive Internet chorus surrounding 3d Mario when 2d Mario lacks such online energy but has that energy in the market.”
I believe there are two factors at play here, Malstrom: One is gamers’ nostalgia for Mario 64, which accounts for 3d Mario hype, and the other is Nintendo’s persistent use of bland music and graphics in 2d Mario, which generates apathy, the exact opposite of hype, in those same gamers. I’ll try to elaborate, but apologies in advance if this turns into a wall of text.
I’m not a huge 3d Mario fan. I was, once upon a time, but then I was very critical of Nintendo reusing the ‘collect 120 stars’ formula in Sunshine, and again in Galaxy. Your blog posts helped me see many of the flaws inherent in 3d Mario titles which kept me from wanting to repeatedly replay them as I had SMB3 and SMW. Yet… I still hold a special place in my heart for SM64, and I’ve thought a lot about why that is. Because I was born in the mid-80s, one of my first games was Super Mario Bros. I went through Mario Mania just like everyone else, playing each new game, reading the comics, watching the cartoons and that awful movie. And when Super Mario 64 came out, it absolutely blew my mind. All throughout 1996 up until the release, game magazines hyped the fact that Mario would talk, that you’d be able to explore the Mushroom Kingdom in 3d and go anywhere you want… and in my naive 12 year old brain, I really wondered whether this game would be endless. You know those digging sections of SMB2? I pictured Mario being able to dig in the sand like that, except the sand would go on for infinity, and there would be endless doors and secrets to be found–like I said, naive, but Nintendo was able to inspire that kind of magical thinking in kids’ brains back then.
When the game finally came out, I was disappointed that there still limits to where you could go (i.e. invisible boundaries over each hill and wall), but Malstrom–this is the key to understanding people’s fixation with 3d Mario–it was awe-inspiring. I can understand why it wouldn’t have been for you, since you had been jaded by the 16-bit console wars and were more concerned with PC gaming at that time. But for the many of us who’d played 2d Mario for years and were experiencing real 3d movement for the first time, we were wonderstruck. You could look up and see the sky above the Mushroom Kingdom, hear the birds chirp, do incredible backflips and sideflips and every kind of jump imaginable! There were so many secrets, some true–Yoshi is on the roof, and if you talk to him he’ll give you 100 lives!–and some false–Luigi is hidden in the game, and if you find him, you can play as him! Everything was mysterious and wonderful. All the schoolyard buzz that sprung up around SMB was reborn for SM64. Everyone had a friend who claimed to be able to do some insane trick no one else could conceive.
Please take for my word for this–whatever you think of the core gameplay in comparison to 2d Mario, very few of us who were kids at the time were willing to criticize it; we were too excited by all the secrets and tricks we were discovering. Meanwhile, there were some adults who did criticize it. I’ll never forget Howard “The Game Master” Phillips review of Super Mario 64 (this was a few years after he left Nintendo); he trashed it for being too simple, and said that, like SMW, there was very little to discover once you got the flying ability. But I think for the most part gamers at that time were blown away by N64, not only by the graphics, but by the new sense of freedom we thought 3d movement granted us–and Mario 64 was the poster boy for that.
So I firmly believe the reason why so many people (especially hardcore game reviewers) are so vocal about their love for 3d Mario is because of their fond memories of SM64. With each new title in the series they hope Nintendo can conjure up that magical feeling they got when they played their first 3d Mario game. And since Odyssey brought back the sandbox-style levels that originated in 64, you can see why this last game was particularly exciting for them.
So where does this leave 2d Mario? 2d Mario can be mysterious, secret-filled, wonder-inspiring, and all those things gamers of my generation felt about SM64, so why does it lack the online energy 3d Mario has? You already know the answer, as it’s something you yourself have said many a time: Nintendo has never made a 2d Mario that can compete with Super Mario Bros. 3. There were a few good efforts–Super Mario World, Super Mario Land 2–but nothing came close, and by the time they brought 2d Mario back in 2006, the Mario team had all but abandoned hand-drawn graphics. Consequently, the Mushroom Kingdom was given a very homogenized 3d rendered look. Perfectly round hills with light reflections (are they plastic?). Slow moving enemies that were impossible to miss. A soundtrack full of wah-wahs and bah-bahs, half of which were recycled tunes from the original game.
Yawn.
And they’ve kept this up for 4 games now. Why should anyone be excited for 2d Mario? Even when the gameplay is there, as it was with NSMBWii multiplayer, do these games honestly LOOK as fun as the old games? The screenshots show nothing but generic looking graphics that they’ve reused since 2006. Whereas 2d Mario didn’t just get a fresh new coat of paint each time–it got a whole new engine AND exterior! The “New” in New Super Mario Bros. is a joke. The punchline is that people are still buying them despite Nintendo putting almost no effort into them.
I would like a comparison of the marketing budgets for any 3d Mario and a 2d Mario. I think that would be very eye opening.
Knowing these game companies as I do, I do think some of this ‘energy’ is artificially made by the marketing department. All these companies do it. They must ‘viral market’ the product.
There is intense interest from Miyamoto and others for 3d Mario to succeed. But when you consider the outrageous budgets including the marketing budget, does it?
I think the secret sauce in Super Mario Brothers was the ‘Open World’ philosophy that seeped in due to the same development team was also making The Legend of Zelda at the same time. 2d platformers, like Adventure Island or even Ninja Gaiden, felt like obstacle courses. But Super Mario Brothers games felt like WORLDS. They weren’t even called levels but worlds. World One. World Two. Desert World. Giant World. Pipe World.
This is partly mentioned Kotaku’s look at Super Mario Brothers 3. I do like Howard Phillips views on how the game gives you more and more control. I agree games make ‘challenging’ by introducing novelty and then punishing you for it.
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