Miyamoto surrounds himself with fun things in order to enrich his creativity. If he doesn’t keep dreaming, pleasing characters and stories will never show up in his imagination.

The above quote comes from a “making of” children’s book series published in 1989. This particular volume is dedicated to dissecting all things related to the creation of “Super Mario Bros 3”, which at the time had only been released in Japan the year prior.

Much of its colorful pages teaches about the business of mass production, with more than half of the book tasked with showing how global shipping gets so many cartridges to millions of wanting children. Yet covertly, its passages are also dense with otherwise rare information about the inner core of Nintendo’s development process back in the late 1980’s. (A translation of the text is provided online by Chris Covell).

Choice quotes from the team are blown up overtop Kodak snapshots that show a young Miyamoto and Koji Kondo, among others, all exhaustively hunched over desks. Work areas are caked in paper, Famicon equipment, and all sorts of colorful knick-knacks.

One passage explains that the team spent two years of hard work on Super Mario Bros. 3. During this time, exactly what the team was going to fill the game with was portrayed as a constant struggle. How the trio successfully addressed the challenge of living up to the original “Super Mario Bros.” was addressed mostly through curt and cutely understated children’s book diction:

Playing video games is easy, but making such games isn’t!

In order to squeeze out ideas which haven’t been shown before, the staff all go together to see movies, go to art museums, music or dance events, play other games, read books; all to find inspiration hidden here and there.

Co-director Takashi Tezuka was said to double down on this:

Tezuka also often looks to movies, music, events, art exhibitions, etc. for ideas. He often watches music shows on TV and reads lots of comic books. While to some this might look like play, it is serious work to him.

Then 27, Takashi Tezuka described himself as knowing “nothing” about video games at the time he was hired at Nintendo. (Previous to Mario 3, he co-directed “Super Mario Bros.”, and was Lead Director of what became “The Lost Levels” in America, and “Super Mario Bros. 2” in Japan).

On Super Mario Bros. 3, Tezuka worked within coding restraints to make the wildest requests come true, somehow throwing tornados, chain-chomps, and even the sun itself at the player.

Koji Kondo, too, took an interesting approach for his part on the project. In composing the score for the game:

…He doesn’t begin composing for a game after the story and images have all been completed, but rather he joins in the same brainstorming meetings as everyone else and imagines the sound of the game from these sessions. However, once Kondo has begun full-scale composition and arrangement, he doesn’t consult anybody.

This speaks wonders about Kondo’s creative process. Imagine Kondo alone with a keyboard and only the prompt: “Player flies onto a floating battleship”.

Yet the most telling section of all, however, is also the most mysterious on its face – if not the most outright whimsical:

Miyamoto…(had) worried about how scenes would work for each world theme, such as land, sea, and sky (themes). Even what to do at the entrances to pipes was carefully considered. The biggest worry for him is boredom. No matter how he does it, he has to get the player to stay interested at all times in the game.

Pictured is the bag that Mr. Miyamoto always carries with him when he goes walking. He’s used it so much that the color has faded. But inside the bag are many little items that he says will aid him in thinking up fun ideas.

What’s in the bag is a secret to everyone.

Unlike his first adventure, Mario this time ran through treacherous deserts, battled giants, and explored eerily hollow caverns. Miyamoto’s secret bag, the contents of which somehow aided in the creation of these off-the-wall concepts, gushes of pure intrigue. But the honest truth is that it likely didn’t matter what was hiding inside that bag.

What really mattered was that he looked outside of himself in the first place.

If you can remember every level of the original Mario games, yet can hardly remember any specifics about the newer sidescrollers, it might come down to a question of true creativity.

The creation of Super Mario Bros. 3 was in many ways a passionate response to both the initial limitations and the lessons learned from “Super Mario Bros.”. More frankly, it was also an impassioned response to the overly iterative nature of the Japanese “Super Mario Bros. 2”.

A reputation that is evidenced in the history of the game’s distribution alone, the handling of Super Mario Bros. 2 in America affirmed the game lacked a suitable artistic (and marketable) vision in the eyes of its creators. Released in America only as “The Lost Levels”, the American version of “Super Mario Bros. 2” famously saw a makeshift palette swap with Japanese game “Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic”. As a result, Japan’s “Super Mario Bros. 2” has held eternal novelty status with both media historians and fans alike.

Conversely to The Lost Levels, you would be forgiven if you did not know Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros 3 were playing on the same hardware; Everything in Super Mario Bros. 3, from the physics to the double layered, synthesized music, and to the popping art direction all shown through in impressively large stride over the original Mushroom Kingdom adventure.

The game takes place on a literal stage, complete with ascending, red curtains and with the aesthetics of a board-game-like overworld:

It is highly plausible the creators’ constant intake of movies and museum displays during Mario 3’s development lent to Mario 3’s general feel.

The aforementioned children’s book told of a team in constant search of unusual but appealing ways to realize and animate their universe. As such, rather than stick with the common gaming motifs of aliens, guns, and blocks (motifs that might sound strangely familiar to modern day gamers), Tezuka and Miyamoto scorched their graphics chips with off the wall (but still organic) cartoonish enemies, vivid terrains expressed with even their own climates, and overly silly designs that only now seem normal through their raw popularity (A leaf that turns you into a flying raccoon? Really?)

Mario 3 shipped, and everything came together as hoped. The title would go on to sell millions and be heralded as the classic that is still played by many to this day. What followed in 1990 was an encore; Despite what appreciably would have been enormous pressure to yet again top a culturally beloved game, Mario 3’s sequel titled “Super Mario World” in America for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System saw a similar quantum leap in inventive design.

As Mario 3 had done before it, Mario World used a color palette both broad and unapologetic. Enemies literally jumped out of the walls, switched between foregrounds and backgrounds, and reacted differently to Mario and Luigi to the point of seamlessly conveying their physical properties. The music bounced, sped up, and reverbed like few games had before it. In Mario tradition, optional secrets hid in playful areas, much as if to say to the player, “Aren’t video games funny?” The internal logic of the Mario Bros. universe remained, but the deeper toolbox of the SNES brought Mario to even higher highs with fine-tuned gameplay overtop a seemingly inhabitable cartoon.

Super Mario World introduced a level of playfulness with the platforming formula that has become celebrated to such a degree that it has become difficult to properly cite. As a thought exercise, try to imagine the ratio of conversations held about Yoshi as an engineered means of gameplay variation, as opposed to just being a really awesome character.

This take on Mario was riddled with style, and if the game was grueling to make, it would not be surprising. Super Mario Bros and its original sequels have had such an impact on game makers the world over, it’s hard to believe that there was a time where they had yet to be invented.

And so it was when New Super Mario Bros. was announced in 2006 for the Nintendo DS that Mario, his friends, his enemies, and all their two-dimensional worlds were promised back to us all. The new game’s tongue-in-cheek name – likely birthed through marketing necessity – was a not so subtle proclamation that said proudly: “Here we go again, everyone! He’s back!” It still seems difficult to imagine that the two dimensional Super Mario series had gone 14 entire years without a pure sidescrolling entry (“Yoshi’s Island” notwithstanding, 1992’s Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins for the original Nintendo Gameboy was the last such game of its ilk.)

Despite the arduous wait for fans, the drought became an afterthought upon its release. New Super Mario Bros. earned high critical praises and went on to sell a mammoth-sized 30 million copies. It was obvious to everyone, most of all Nintendo, that the world was starved for another romp through the Mushroom Kingdom.

Art-wise, New Super Mario Bros. looked similar to what a Mario game might look like if you closed your eyes and were asked to describe a typical Mario level out loud. The ground is yellowish, right? Sky is blue, of course. Turtles happen. And then after that, there are underground places. Castles, too, and ghosts. Then you jump on a flag.

Using the logic of not fixing what wasn’t broken, New Super Mario Bros. proved solidly fun. At its release, it was cathartic just making one’s way left to right with these plumbers for the first time in nearly a decade and a half, or even possibly watching your child pick up where you had left off. Had it remained a back-to-basics entry in the series, it might have gained familiarity as a sort of reimagined tribute to the verisimilitudes of Mario’s purest conventions.

Instead, it became its very own long-running series, and the Mario sidescrolling series hasn’t recovered since.

In 2012, IGN sat down with then-producer Takashi Tezuka to discuss “New Super Mario Bros U” for Nintendo’s latest home console. This was the fourth game in the “New” series, with individualized sequels having been released for each major Nintendo hardware release: The Nintendo DS, The Nintendo Wii, the Nintendo 3DS, and now the Nintendo Wii U. All shared identical art styles and general aesthetics.

Among the questions posed, Tezuka was asked to elaborate on what precise design elements were involved when the company set out to construct a Super Mario game:

Well, to be honest with you… we didn’t really think about it all that much…The thing that we concentrate on the most is – what is going to be the most enjoyable experience? What level design is going to be the most fun? That’s always in the forefront of our thinking when we’re creating or designing those levels.

Here Tezuka stressed: we design only for fun, nothing more, or nothing less.

Was this a different tune than the experimental Tezuka of the past? Have Mario games predominately been about level design? His ultimate goal, one might say, was not unlike his goal for Super Mario Bros. 3: Have fun. Right?

If one were to read between the lines, this might actually be taken as a non-answer, rather than a full explanation of how Mario games come to be realized. Nintendo would certainly be loath to release Mario’s gameplay “secret sauce”, after all.

A better, yet indirect peak into how a Mario game’s design informs its gameplay, and visa versa, was recently laid bare during an interview released through one of the company’s self-published “Iwata Asks” editorials. (Hosted by CEO of Nintendo Saturo Iwata, this long-running editorial series acts as a sort of “Behind the scenes” expose between various creators of Nintendo games.)

Here with Yusuke Amano, director of “New Super Mario Bros. 2” for the Nintendo 3DS, a revelation:

Iwata:

Okay. First of all, I’d like to ask how this project started. Now normally when people imagine how video games are made, you’d think that it starts off by building its base mechanics, and then work on designing the courses. But I heard this game’s start was a little different.

Amano:

Yes, that’s right. This time the team that researches course design started working on developing the courses first, and the other staff were called in to turn it into an actual product. This format was a first for me.

For New Super Mario Bros. 2 (and New Super Mario Bros. U), it was again affirmed that courses were designed completely ahead of the game design itself. All these course structures would only later be adorned with what could fairly be called every generic Mario aesthetic in the book.

It is hard to imagine that this protocol existed for any other reason but for ensuring the Mario-brand underpinnings kept to a certain standard of replicable quality, especially in the face of such rapid sequel production. The seriousness to which Nintendo takes the responsibility of creating competent Mario structures is discussed at length, as the two went on to describe Nintendo’s own “Mario Cram School”.

As Amano spills here, the Mario Cram School is a literal course in Mario sidescrolling stage design hosted by members of Nintendo’s Entertainment Analysis & Development Division (EAD), Software Planning & Development Department, and other departments within Nintendo. In fact, Mario Cram School was organized by Tezuka himself with the intention of teaching Nintendo’s younger designers the fundamentals to Mario’s inner-workings. “Graduates” are literally certified and set to work implementing Nintendo’s stringent standards.

Understanding the necessity for teaching this school comes with the acknowledgment of Nintendo’s aging senior members. But that truth alone would not paint the complete picture.

Amano states, “We wanted to make a solid, classic Super Mario game, so first we reconstructed the Super Mario stage elements, and then made 80 stages—no, more than that—and added in a bunch of the coin elements…and reconstructed the stages yet again…and I think it turned out to be a game that is fun to play.”

Strolling turtles, underwater enemies, and flying goombas…what truly constitutes a “classic Mario element” can be labyrinthine and easy to mislabel if one keeps to only Amano and Nintendo’s surface logic of game design.

In fact, the actual “classic Mario element” has been entirely budgeted out of Nintendo’s priorities for the “New” games. First, let’s understand why, so you can later learn what those elements are.

Nintendo Relies on Mario for Sales

Firstly, understand that Nintendo in 1990 and Nintendo in 2012 are certainly mutually exclusive, and they deserve separate considerations. Both were organizations burdened with high, but different expectations. One looked to avoid one-hit-wonder status, while the other sought to avoid accusations of being past its prime – yes artistically, but most importantly in the marketplace.

Despite Nintendo historically being a risk taker in their hardware launches and franchise designs, Nintendo is not unburdened from having to play the hits. After two major “New” titles catering to a behemoth-sized demographic, Nintendo concurrently invested in not one but two (very) similar titles for the initially struggling Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Wii U, both of which were released in 2012. Each game introduced basic new elements, such as rampant coin collecting and HD visuals, but otherwise remained chained to almost every single trope of the generic Mario aesthetic in the hopes of luring customers of the past, and appeasing the fewer customers of the present. No risks allowed.

For New Super Mario Bros U, Tezuka brought back mostly familiar foes and obstacles. Koji Kondo oversaw synthesized music that did no more than remix the same tune (at least five of the different worlds share an identical melody), and Miyamoto ultimately made sure Mario revisited worlds of ice, sky, sand, and sea.

Borrowed artistry on all accounts.

Those Who Made Now Direct

Secondly: Removed from their original duties, Nintendo’s original lead designers have their hands all throughout the company’s many various projects, both out of necessity, and as a luxury.

As Nintendo looks to capitalize on the success of their classics, part of their challenge is making sure Nintendo of the future still has the tools necessary to keep on doing what they’ve always done. What better way to assure this is there than to instill a system where even new designers can replicate the given essentials of a Mario level in their sleep? In lieu of the massive growth of the company from the 1980’s to present day, the people once responsible for continually inventing Mario are now often responsible for, instead, preserving and guiding the Super franchise.

Those who had the creative autonomy are now directing those with far less of it.

We Love Mario Too Much

And finally, Nintendo’s new generation of obviously talented designers have increasingly been handed access to arguably gaming’s most iconic franchise. Making Mario is a pop cultural responsibility few of us will ever bear. The fruits of their labors strongly suggest that this responsibility is likely hinged to strict style guides. One should also not downplay the enthusiasm one would gain if given the chance to work with a series convention, as would you or I if given the task to animate a kicking raccoon tail. (Miyamoto once recalled that his students would almost uniformly, and initially without instruction, end their stage designs with a flagpole – a design note he found both amusing and telling.)

Because of large install bases, strict guidelines, and an understandably beloved past, Mario is now defined by what got him to his iconic status…instead of the reason he got there in the first place.

As such, the New Super Mario Bros. series is a rare example of Nintendo nodding to their players instead of jumping out and laughing with them. Without a “secret bag” to inspire the original recipe, Nintendo has only been looking inside themselves.

So finally, when left to a reduction of just an inspired group, few barriers, and smart guidance, what kind of game really is Mario?

The most classic Mario element is not flags or turtles, nor has it ever been.

The most classic Mario element has always been the element of surprise.

As an example of this in practice, if you were forced to guess what was going to happen during the next level of Super Mario World during an original playthrough in 1990, the odds were not great that you would often be correct. Now, Nintendo bets that consumers would be upset if they couldn’t guess what was coming next.

Despite making a series of enjoyably passable titles – and even when taking into account the difficulty of living up to the original series – whenever Mario has strictly gone left to right, he hasn’t hopped along with that unbridled level of willingness to experiment and hardware pushing artistry since 1992.

And it hasn’t even been close.

To use Amano’s own words: “Solid”, but not “classic”. The “New” sidescrolling games will never be remembered as classic games in their own right by the same standard.

Where does Mario go from here? No matter how he does it, the answer is still: “to the right”.

The level editing game Super Mario Maker notwithstanding, we are still awaiting Mario’s next sidescrolling move here in 2015. To Nintendo’s obvious credit, a shallower level of production investment has worked: fans voted with their dollars to the shrieking tune of over 70 million units of sales for the New series to date.

It also bears mentioning that Nintendo has shown brazen signs of taking their mascot to more creative highs through his 3D counterpart in the Super Mario Galaxy series, as well as most recently in the Wii U title Super Mario 3D World (An excellent overview of the latter’s creative process can be found here.) Both series feature eye-popping art styles and refined soundtracks that the series is often cited for inducing, even while still working largely within Mario’s core conventions. Yet while both Galaxy titles combined have nearly reached sales of (an impressive) 20 million copies, the title “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”, for example, hit over 28 million copies completely by itself.

With an attach rate of one sale per every 3.6 of the 100 million Wii’s sold, this level of flooring success is the reason sidescrolling Mario is still king.

Reconciling all these issues does not outright demean the use of conventions. Nintendo is certainly wise to provide a school that exposes their designers to the countless insights they have amassed over three decades of enviable success, and this practice is unlikely to change.

Rather, if and when they return to the world of Mario scrolling by left to right, one can only hope that their designers will be allowed to bring in a mystery bag of their very own to work, each and every day.