Nintendo has always been fully aware of the importance and popularity of the 2D line of Mario platformers, even as the 3D games have continued to enjoy increasing success, and after New Super Mario Bros. U on the Wii U back in 2012, the Japanese company had clearly decided that whatever came next for the 2D Mario series would have to be a major shake-up, regardless of how long its development process could end up being.
In fact, in a recent interview published by Nintendo in its Ask the Developer series, several members of the Super Mario Bros. Wonder development team have spoken about the free reign they were given during the 2D platformer’s development, not only in terms of no deadlines being placed on them during the process – something Nintendo has spoken about in the past as well – but also thanks to the company providing an “ample” budget for development.
“We wanted to create a game with much more to offer than ever before, so this time, we didn’t set a fixed time period for development, which is usually decided before we kick off,” said veteran producer Takashi Tezuka. “To create something truly enjoyable, we decided to take our time and dedicate ample budget for development without having to worry about the production schedule. So at first, we only had a small group working on the development.”
Later in the interview, Tezuka also revealed that plenty of the game’s budget was allocated to implementation visual and animation improvements, with art director Masanobu Sato adding, “Since we knew we had ample budget to develop the game, we didn’t have to worry about the amount of resources we’d spend to craft even small details.”
More than a decade on from the launch of the last mainline 2D Mario title, it’s clear that Nintendo placed little to no restrictions on the development of Wonder. How successfully the game will be able to breathe new life into the series’ 2D line of games remains to be seen, but it has certainly looked promising in all that we’ve seen of it so far.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder launches on October 20 for Nintendo Switch.