Legendary developer Shigeru Miyamoto recently took the opportunity to discuss the future of the 3D Mario series. Miyamoto says that they have modelled Super Mario 3D World on the critically acclaimed Nintendo 3DS game, Super Mario 3D Land. He says that the reason they did this was to make sure the game was the most accessible Mario title yet.

“I think there may an impression that Mario 3D Land did well, so that’s why we decided to bring that to Wii U. But, in fact, what we really try to do is look at, “What is the easiest way for people to play the Mario games?” And certainly we have the new Super Mario Bros. series, which is the new sidescrolling games, and those are particularly easy to play for people who are more novice gamers. You’ve got four-player multiplayer. And then we have games like the Galaxy series.”

“What we tried to do with Super Mario 3D Land, was try to create a Mario game that was set in a 3D world that fell somewhere between the openness of the Galaxy games and the sidescrolling of the new Super Mario Bros. games to create a 3D Mario game that a wider array of people could play. And we felt that, with Super Mario 3D Land, we managed to achieve that. So, what we wanted to do was extend that broader appealing 3D Mario game to Wii U in a way that allow more people to experience it. That’s what we chose for Super Mario 3D World this time. But we still have, obviously, the Galaxy series, and there’s a possibility that in the future we may look to explore what else we can do with the Galaxy series. For us, it was really about trying to find the right 3D Mario space in which we’re going to allow the widest audience to play.”

“But definitely with the single-player Mario experience, there’s still a lot of possibilities that we can explore, so I think we’ll probably go back to that again at some point.”

Thanks, Glem3