Next Level on Mario Strikes and Punch-Out!! origins
When you think about it, the fact that Nintendo allowed Next Level Games to make Super Mario Strikers was somewhat unexpected. The studio was a bit unproven at the time yet the Big N nonetheless allowed the developer to get its hands on some of the company’s most-beloved characters.
You might be wondering: how did Next Level’s partnership with Nintendo begin? It was actually the initiative on the part of Next Level that got the ball rolling. The team first decided to make a Mario soccer demo “with no direction from Nintendo”.
Read on below for comments from Next Level Games discussing how Mario Strikers as well as Punch-Out!! came to be.
Wired: So then turning our focus to Next Level Games, Bryce, how did Next Level originally get started with Nintendo at the time of Mario Strikers?
Holliday: That one came about with a demo that we did to show how quality of a developer we were. So we did a Mario soccer demo, with no direction from Nintendo, just, hey, let’s see what you guys can do with Mario characters on the soccer pitch. And we had a pink, over-saturated, jumping on the ball, rolling kind of soccer game that was created in 6 months as a proof of concept.
Wired: And you had gone in and spoken to Nintendo about possibly working with them. Did they give you that direction of “Why don’t you make a soccer game?”
Holliday: Yep, exactly.
Wired: Identifying that was a hole in their lineup; they had Mario Tennis and Mario Kart but not Mario Soccer.
Holliday: And our pedigree was doing sports games. We did NHL Hitz. And a lot of us, if you go further back into the Vancouver industry, there’s a lot of sports games. FIFA‘s made in town. Things like that. So we actually had experience with not only the sport, but some of the character animations, key frame animations, which is really important.
Wired: And at that time, the sports market was getting narrower, right? Electronic Arts was grabbing a lot of exclusive licenses and things of that nature, and it was going from a whole ton of different sports games to maybe you’d buy one game of each sport.
Holliday: Yep, and it was definitely trying to find our own niche there. That’s what Nintendo was coming to us for, what would be a Western take on soccer? A Western take on Mario characters, first of all, and then embed them in the soccer game because that was a hole in their sports lineup.
Wired: So you did a very cartoony game, what you perceived to be a Mario take on soccer, and Nintendo came back and said they wanted something more realistic or more dramatic?
Holliday: We tried to emulate Nintendo at the time, Toadstool Tour and games like that. And Tanabe-san, our director at the time with SPD Group #3, and we did a complete demo and basically earned the right to contract to prototype a real game. And we said, okay, let’s just keep building on the existing demo, and they said, nope, throw it out, this is what we want you to do.
Wired: What was the direction then?
Holliday: They wanted the aggressive –- that’s not the right word, but they wanted to see their characters be competitive. In Mario Kart, everyone’s happy and they’re high-fiving when they win. They wanted to see a competitive take on a sports game. And they thought our background, being in Vancouver compared to Japan, we would challenge them to be different. So that’s why the pads went on them, and checking went into the game –- it kind of became a hockey/soccer hybrid game by Strikers Charged.
Wired: So having reinvented soccer for Nintendo, or brought back soccer into their catalog, you moved on toPunch-Out!! Now that was not intended to be Nintendo coming in and saying, try a new Western thing. There, the edict was, take this classic game people love and make something that feels very much like that game. So that had to be a unique challenge for you guys.
Holliday: To go into the Nintendo process of prototyping, they’ve got a really strong commitment to trying things and experimentation, and they’ve instilled those values on to us in the 10 years. A lot of times, we build demos or prototypes and then can’t see where it would go, and then move on to something else. Down to the feature level when you’re actually building a game or even at the pitch concept, tech demo level. At the end of Strikers, we’d had enough of the relationship learning how they make games and earning their respect that we actually were able to say, let’s do Punch-Out!!.
Wired: Okay, so this was you guys.
Holliday: We were saying, hey, the project’s coming to an end -– we worked with Nintendo of America because that game is extremely popular in North America and other territories – and then the relationship has us saying, hey, we’d like to do this, or them coming to us and saying we’ve got this project.
