Super Mario Bros. Wonder: one Wonder Flower turns every level into a surprise (2023)

By 2023, 2D Mario had two problems: there had not been a brand-new side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. in almost 11 years, and Super Mario Maker had let millions of players build their own courses, which made some fans and journalists ask whether Nintendo needed to make one at all. Producer Takashi Tezuka disagreed, and gave his team a deceptively simple brief: create a Mario game full of hidden surprises and wonders, the way the 1985 original felt to players who had never seen a block yield a coin.

The breakthrough came from pushing the idea further than the team thought possible. Director Shiro Mouri first proposed warping players to another world with an item, but Tezuka rejected that as no different from the pipes of past games: "Can't we make the course itself transform?" A prototype that twisted and bent pipes proved it was possible. That became the Wonder effect: collect a Wonder Flower and a familiar course turns into a short, wild, one-time scene, from pipes coming alive to the player becoming a giant Spike-Ball.

To find enough wonders, Nintendo held studio-wide idea-sharing sessions in which programmers, designers and sound staff wrote ideas on sticky notes — over 2,000 in all — and prototypes were built immediately. The team built a new engine instead of reusing the New Super Mario Bros. one. Details were part of the idea: Mario's jump sound is an electric ukulele of Yezo spruce whose dynamics change with jump strength, and Elephant Mario was invented backwards from mechanics the designers wanted — a bigger body, side block hits and water spray.

The result was the fastest-selling Super Mario game ever: 4.3 million copies in its first two weeks after its October 20, 2023 launch. Nintendo later credited the local and online multiplayer — around half of players played with others — and the Super Mario movie for keeping demand high, but the design bet was the draw: a 2D Mario where a level could surprise even a veteran player, a promise Wonder made for every course.