Today was a exciting day for Super Mario fans. Nintendo officially released some more gameplay footage and provided more details on the next 2D Mario game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Meanwhile, video gaming media outlets have been providing some hands-on impressions of the game.
However, that’s not all. Producer Takashi Tezuka and director Shiro Mouri were recently interviewed by Wired. In the interview, Tezuka revealed that Super Mario Bros. Wonder did not have any deadline during development. In fact, Tezuka says that “I wanted to prevent people from saying, ‘We won’t make that deadline, so that’s why we didn’t do it—we can’t do it”.
With the development team not stressed about meeting deadlines, it allowed them to make the game at their own pace and come up with lots of ideas on what the game could have. For example, Tezuka and Mouri asked the entire team for ideas on Wonder Flower effects, “regardless of what part of the game they were working on or how many years they’ve been working at Nintendo”. According to Mouri, they ended up receiving “probably over a thousand, 2,000 ideas”. This pool of ideas was eventually narrowed down, and they refined what they had.
Well look at the results! Obviously most games will still need to have a deadline, but imagine this model being used for bigger Switch 2 games! I would love to see this kind of creative freedom and time put into the next Zelda game. Tears of the Kingdom was phenomenal, but imagine the Nintendo team with more breathing room than ever. Heck, I don’t care if the next game takes 8 years, the result will be worth the wait. And apply this to the next Mario Kart and Smash Bros. I can be very patient if this level of quality is the result.
This the fact that this had no deadline really shows especially with the quality and the animations it just seems like a cool project to work on.
Panzer Dragoon Saga was a game that turned out really great because of the loose management, but did cost Sega a lot of money because creative freedom was prioritised before the business aspect.
Which is how I wish things always worked, but because they used so much time developing the game, Sega Saturn were already dead because they didn’t have their Final Fantasy VII-“k1ller” ready to compete in a timely manner. “No one” ended up playing that masterpiece, speculations say that only 1.000 copies were distributed across Europe.
Morale of the story? Balance. Most games need both creative freedom and some structure.
If there is a game series that can pull it of with creative freedom as the sole focus; Super Mario Bros. is one of the few; but most likely because the team making the game is so experienced and structured it doesn’t cost them much creative freedom to operate on a semi-business perspective.
Most games and companies always needed a deadline on what projects or games on what date that need to be done on the dot. I mean Super Mario Odyssey took 4 years in development and Smash Bros Ultimate took 3 years in development.
There’s no such thing as no deadline. What would have Nintendo big 2023 game been instead? Mario RPG? Pokémon Teal? Wario wario?
I’d love for this to be true but let’s be real.
gamefreak needs to tell it’s team to have an infinite deadline for Pokémon gen 10.