How Nintendo approaches Mario’s power-ups

Power-ups are some of the most important elements in a Mario title. Super Mario Bros. 3, for instance, wouldn’t be nearly the same without the inclusion of the Super Leaf or Tanooki Suit.

You might be wondering: how does Nintendo approach the power-ups? How does Nintendo decide which ones to bring back?

Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka was asked about this in the latest issue of Game Informer.

He responded with the following:

“That’s a difficult task for us. Every time we work on a new Mario title, that’s one of the things that we’re always wondering about and talking about with the team. What we do is, we look at the courses. As we’re playing through the courses, we think, ‘What would be a good power-up or a good ability for Mario to have on this course?’ Then we build some of them and try them out and see if it worked or didn’t work. With a Mario game, what you really need to ensure is that those abilities or power-ups work on many different courses. Because of the number of courses, you want to make sure that it’s not, ‘It works well here, but maybe not on these other 20.’ That’s sort of the process by which we go about looking at which power-ups to revisit or whether we want to bring in new ones.

Tezuka also shared an interesting tidbit about New Super Mario Bros. U’s Flying Squirrel suit. Originally, it wasn’t possible to make Mario (or the other playable characters) elevate a bit by shaking the Wiimote. This was something that the team added later on in development.

“For this iteration of New Super Mario Bros., we have the flying squirrel. If you notice, if you shake the Wii remote while he’s gliding you’ll actually boost and get a little bit of elevation. That wasn’t the original idea; that’s something we added as we were going through development and realized it would be a good addition to the fundamental feature of the flying squirrel Mario.”