User:Nintendo101

Casual Nintendo historian. Otherwise an artist and a professional zoologist. Bio degree. I've had an account here since 2012.

I wrote the character sections for Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Super Mario Odyssey. I contributed much of the article for Super Mario Sunshine and am currently working on Super Mario Galaxy.

I have been a fan of Nintendo since a very young age. My first Mario games (and three of the first video games I ever owned) were Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario 64 DS, and Mario Kart DS. These games were good company for a young kid who moved around a lot and had difficulty keeping long-lasting friends.

During the, I sequentially played some of my favorite games in the Super Mario series to 100% completion. This includes, in order, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and Super Mario Odyssey. It's been really fun so far! These are great games, and I always wanted to marathon a series like this before but never had the time. It has been interesting to see where the series began and where it has ended up. The design philosophies, the characters, the art directions, world building, level design, narrative, etc. All good stuff. It might be fun to write something about it some day.

My favorite video game character is Yoshi.

My hope is to help make the SMG article on par with the best of the wiki (i.e. Super Mario World, Super Mario 3D World, the Donkey Kong Country games), and to use it as a reference for other Super Mario game articles. To me, these games are the heart of the franchise and it'd be nice if the articles can have some uniformity between them. I never intended to fully invest in just this one game, but as a person, it can be hard to move on when it feels like there is still work to be done. My hope is to bring some of what is done here to Super Mario Sunshine, Galaxy 2, and Odyssey.

Development
1997 – 2004: Mario 128 and Jungle Beat

Super Mario Galaxy was developed as a response to the principles of 3D game design established by Super Mario 64. That game was one of the first 3D titles ever published and has a significant foundational influence in how 3D games are made, not just at Nintendo but throughout the entire industry. Despite its influence, there was an internal impression that it caused a divide between people that did not exist during the 2D era of video games. While some people enjoy playing 3D games, there are some who feel that they are too difficult. Yoshiaki Koizumi, who was one of the assistant directors on Mario 64, attributes this to what he believes are the biggest challenges in 3D game design: depth misperception; the ease with which a player can get lost; and motion sickness. The solutions created to mitigate these problems, most significantly camera controls, resulted in systems that were too cumbersome or at least intimidating for players. After Super Mario 64 was released, Shigeru Miyamoto assembled a team within Nintendo EAD to develop a successor tentatively titled Super Mario 128 that would be worked on for over ten years. At, it appeared as a for the Nintendo GameCube. Directed by Koizumi, it sees the player controlling 128 Marios on a saucer-shaped platform that dynamically changes shape over the course of the demo. Some of the principals from the demo were incorporated into other games such as Pikmin (2001), but Miyamoto did not abandon the intention of producing a successor to Super Mario 64. The Mario 128 project continued to be worked on intermittently.

The Mario 64 sequel Super Mario Sunshine was developed for the GameCube and released in 2002. Miyamoto, who served as one of Mario Sunshine's producers, asserted it was unrelated to Mario 128 and was best viewed as a revisitation of Mario 64. It was around this time that Miyamoto conceived the "spherical world" idea for Mario 128 that would become the core concept for Super Mario Galaxy. Derived from the SpaceWorld demo, it was believed that this concept would resolve many of the problems with previous 3D games in deemphasizing the need to control the camera and decreasing the likelihood of the player getting lost. Koizumi thought this had the potential to become a full game, but implementing a concept like that would be technically near-impossible. Koizumi was a co-director on Mario Sunshine and this would be the last 3D-related project he was involved with for several years. He oversaw the integration of a camera mode system in that game that he would come to regret, feeling this only exasperated the problems of 3D design. He came to the perspective that it was difficult to produce the "perfect 3D control environment" where it was fun to play but not needlessly stressful for the player.

Koizumi's next project was at the newly-formed studio Nintendo EAD Tokyo where he directed Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a 2D action-adventure platformer released in 2004 for the GameCube. The player controls Donkey Kong with the DK Bongos, which has fewer input options than the conventional GameCube controller. The experience of developing Jungle Beat made Koizumi realize a fun action game could be made with few button inputs required of the player. They had established what Koizumi calls "contextual binding", where available player actions would be changed depending on the timing and context. Koizumi also observed that an exaggerated presentation delights bystanders that were not directly playing the game. These were concepts he brought to Miyamoto for future projects. In 2003, before they had started development on Jungle Beat, a staff member expressed interest in making the next Super Mario game. The experience of working together as a team for Jungle Beat made Koizumi realize that this was something they could accomplish and that they had the technical skill needed to bring Miyamoto's spherical world concept to fruition.

2005 – 2007: Super Mario Revolution

In 2005, Koizumi prepared an outline for what was called "Super Mario Revolution" for the GameCube's successor, the Wii. Adapted from the SpaceWorld 2000 demo and building on what EAD Tokyo had accomplished with Jungle Beat, the core concept of "Super Mario Revolution" for it to be a 3D action platformer with Mario running around spherical worlds. Once the development was approved by Nintendo's executives, Koizumi spent three months creating a small prototype with several other EAD Tokyo employees to present to Miyamoto for his feedback. The prototype was set in space because it was believed that most players would interpret spherical worlds as planets. This set a precedent where Miyamoto would be the first one to all of the game's builds, with a system eventually being set up that allowed the staff to send him a build from the Tokyo studio to his office in Kyoto as soon as it was finished. In the last few months of development, Miyamoto made frequent in-person visits to EAD Tokyo.

Development progressed with the involvement of more staff and with the game eventually being renamed Super Mario Galaxy. It succeeded Mario 128 as the "true" successor to Super Mario 64. An important tenet during development was to prioritize what Koizumi refers to as the "ease of play". The number of button inputs required by the player was kept to a minimum. The spin move was added to supplement jumping actions, which Koizumi believes can be unprecise for players in a 3D environment. Originally they made it so that Mario could spin indefinitely by shaking the Wii Remote, but Miyamoto had them integrate a delay after the spin to make the game more challenging. Contextual binding resulted in the development of scenarios within the game that change what button inputs do, such as in the rolling ball minigame, ray surfing, and power-ups. Pointer controls deeply integrated into Mario Galaxy to supplement or even replace traditional button inputs, as the team felt it was more intuitive. There was a point in development where they considered making the entire game rely on pointer controls, but they felt it "wouldn't really be Mario" with that type of control setup.

To keep the player from "thinking about the camera", EAD Tokyo developed a new camera system for Mario Galaxy called the "planet camera". It gently follows Mario as he runs across a spherical world without sudden jerks or obscuring his positioning. It requires no input from the player. This element of the game was very important to the staff because they did not want any players to experience motion sickness. To ensure the game was comfortable to play, they heavily relied on the feedback of playtesters, more so than any prior Nintendo game.

In concert with Nintendo's goal of making the Wii appeal to demographics beyond their core consumers, the team wanted Mario Galaxy to appeal to people who do not play video games. One of the ways they did this was by integrating Co-Star Mode, a multiplayer mode that supports someone playing as Mario and a second one supporting a second pointer on screen. This was done so that novice players had a way to play the game. Co-producer Takao Shimizu originally envisioned both players having the same pointer controls, but Miyamoto had them create actions that were only available to the second player in Co-Star Mode. In some instances, this completely changed the balance of the game, as they originally allowed the player to hold moving obstacles in place with the pointer. Staff felt that restricting that action to the second player improved the game's flow. The desire to engage non-players also informed the Mario Galaxy's theatrical cutscenes and lively character animations. This made the game fun for bystanders to watch.

Original build was too easy; adjusted life meter and accessibility to 1-Ups

EAD Tokyo was pressured to finish the game close to the Wii's launch, as several executives were disappointed by Super Mario Sunshine not being a Nintendo GameCube launch title and thought that an earlier release could have helped the GameCube's commercial performance. However, EAD Tokyo decided that making a polished Mario game was more important.

Pre-release and unused content
•	Guppy was not a dolphin!

Promotion
•	Where exactly did that photo of Mario in the zero-gravity airlock come from?

Legacy
•	SMG released during a period when the strength of Japan-based video game studios was generally thought to be on the decline, in part due to the rise of development in American studios to great financial success and the general marketing trends of the industry

•	Well respected Japanese publishers such as Capcom, Konami, Sega, and Nintendo themselves had attempted to significantly retool some of their established franchises for western audiences; most of these attempts were not received well and sold terribly

•	SMG was not artistically compromised by this trend and it was something noted by commentators at the time; its success at BAFTA over Call of Duty was described as a surprise; its reliance on providing accessible, rewarding fun was considered unique at the time (see comparison to Heavy Rain)

•	Though not attributed as the catalyst to the rival of Japanese studios, the critical acclaim and commercial success of SMG was viewed as evidence that Japan was still a significant player in the video game industry

•	SMG almost immediate influence other titles in the greater Mario franchise, such as Mario Kart Wii; Rosalina has been established as a major recurring character in Mario spin-offs

•	Rosalina was one of the first characters pitched for SSB4

•	Influenced development of Gears 5 (2019), Solar Ash (2021), Mario + Rabbids: Spark of Hope (2022), and Momoka

Remakes and ports
•	Wii U

•	Nvidia Shield

•	Super Mario 3D All-Stars

Adaptations
•	SUPER MARIO-KUN

Notable merchandise
•	Cards

Potential articles to review