Game Details Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Wii U

Rating: E for Everyone

Release Date: September 11, 2015

Price: $59.99

Links: Official Web site | Nintendo eShop Nintendo: Nintendo: Wii U: E for EveryoneSeptember 11, 2015: $59.99

It's easy for a longtime gamer to be a little hipster about's existence. Through the magic of emulation tools, hobbyists have been able to craft their own Mario levels on PCs since at least the mid-'90s. The results range from the brutally difficult Kaizo Mario series to the elegant Super Mario Remix . For a dedicated, tech-savvy player, the prospect of creating entirely new Mario games, or playing original, player-created levels, is not new.

Seeing Super Mario Maker as old hat is a bit myopic, though. By marrying an easy to use creation and sharing interface to timeless and familiar platform gameplay, Super Mario Maker is going to open up the basic platformer design process to the masses in a way we haven't seen before. It's a magical, accessible play space that seems primed to create a virtuous loop of gameplay and design collaboration with minimal friction and maximum imagination. It's also one of the best examples yet of the underutilized promise of the Wii U.

A magical, intuitive interface























Diving in and making your first level in Super Mario Maker is incredibly easy. The drag and drop grid system does have an extremely short tutorial to go over the basics, but anyone who's ever played a 2D Mario game will instantly understand how to place goombas, pipes, and question-blocks. Being able to jump in and playtest a level in progress with the tap of a button (and half-a-second of loading) is a crucial feature that lends some immediacy and tangibility to the process, allowing you to fix as you go quite easily.

Games like LittleBigPlanet and Project Spark have shown that robust level and game creation tools can be squeezed onto a standard controller, but there's a bit of magic to using the Wii U GamePad touchscreen instead. Besides the drag-and-drop efficiency gains of the stylus, it's simply joyous to trap a goomba under your pen and watch it wiggle and shake with real momentum as you move it along, for example. There are plenty of little Nintendo touches to the process, too. Background singers name objects to the tune of the music as you place them, and incidental background elements pop up automatically as you draw platforms.

Nintendo's interface eschews text-filled sub-menus and complicated dialog boxes whenever possible, utilizing its own symbology to unlock depth instead. Feeding a mushroom to any number of enemies to make them bigger is a perfectly beautiful and obvious touch, as is dragging Mario into a pipe to turn it into a hidden portal or shaking any number of objects to unlock their secondary forms. It's an interface that encourages a childlike experimentation even in adults. What happens if I put wings on a piranha plant? What happens if I stack Bowser on top of seven Buzzy Beetles? What happens if I give a coin to this Lakitu? Can Goombas swim?

Super Mario Maker is like four game builders in one—for each level, you can choose among the original Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. for the theme. Since any in-game objects can be used in any theme, the differences are largely cosmetic—though in the world and color palette of the original Super Mario Bros., it's odd to see things like Chain Chomps and Buzzsaws.

But there are slight gameplay differences as well. Super Mario Bros. 3 gives Mario the ability to fly and pick up certain items like shells. Super Mario World is the first game with a powerful and tight spin jump, while New Super Mario Bros. introduces wall jumps and triple jump somersaults, which changes the feel of each level substantially. There are slight differences in the physics of each theme as well, though all retain the tight controls and feel that have made the Mario franchise a timeless example of platform game design.

Those looking for the ability to perfectly recreate any of those four games are going to be disappointed, though. You can come close to recreating every level in the original Super Mario Bros., but little gameplay differences, like the ability to backtrack and ride in Lakitu's cloud, change the experience slightly.

You can't draw inclines like those found in Mario games since SMB3; everything has to stick to a rigid grid instead. Mario's famous suits are missing from Super Mario Bros. 3 (though the no-longer-rare Kuribo's Shoe is present), and New Super Mario Bros. is missing the joyous Micro and Mega Mushrooms. Small omissions to be sure, but they keep the tools from feeling truly complete.

What to make















After a literal lifetime of playing Super Mario games somewhat obsessively , I already had quite a bit of respect for Shigeru Miyamoto and the team of Nintendo level designers that help make the games so memorable. Playinghas increased that in the same way that facing down an NFL defensive line would probably increase my respect for any quarterback that has to do the same.

Based on my own experiments and the types of levels I've seen other early access players post online, creations generally seem to fall into one of these broad categories:

The Ridiculously Hard level: My first few attempts were efforts to give myself the kind of challenge that surpasses even the hardest of hidden levels in official Mario games. These levels are surprisingly easy to make, but only fun to a certain type of masochistic player who has wasted way too much time perfecting his Mario moves (I'll humblebrag myself into that category).

The Simple and Sweet level: After growing out of the jerk phase, a lot of creators seem to overcompensate and make levels that are ridiculously straightforward. A few enemies, a few haphazardly placed item blocks, and maybe a half-assed staircase near the end. Sometimes there's an experimental section that's much too easy to skip because of some haphazardly placed Starman or Lakitu cloud. Cut, print, and throw it up without playtesting to a generally weak response.

The Maze/Puzzle: Figure out which door to go through in this series of identical looking rooms. Try to hold on to a spiny-shell helmet and a raccoon leaf to fly through a section of ceiling to the goal. Solve basic math equations to decide which fork of a maze-like path to take. These levels can be quite fun, but they have to be carefully pruned to avoid falling into the Ridiculously Hard box.

The Gimmick: Here's a level where the ground and walls are all springboards. Here's a level with a million goombas and a series of blocks shaped like a massive goomba. Here's a level where you're trapped between walls of auto-scrolling buzzsaws. Here's a shoot-em-up style level where you ride Bowser's clown-copter and shoot floating enemies with fireballs. Here's yet another level that beats itself without any input from the player. These kinds of levels can be quite fun and seem pretty popular among pre-release players. It will be interesting to see what gimmicks become popular as the game reaches maturity.

The Good level: Crafting a level like the ones you remember from other Mario games is not as easy as you probably think. It means having hidden areas that are tough but not impossible to find. It means putting in enough enemies to engage but not so many as to enrage. It means jumping challenges that are fun without becoming onerous. It means pacing out some empty sections to balance out those that are a bit crowded. It means maintaining a careful balance of risk and reward, of thrills and breaks, of cleverness and straightforwardness.

Whole books have been written on the nitty-gritty design details that make up that Mario level design magic, but trying to replicate it first-hand shows the difficulties much more directly than simply reading about them. Super Mario Maker's easily unlockable sample levels are like an interactive textbook, providing a solid starting palette of inventive inspiration and getting around the "blank canvas" paralysis new level designers may face (being able to download and tinker with levels posted online serves a similar purpose). The in-game instruction manual also provides some good insights straight from Nintendo's designers, such as "be open to inspiration" and "less is more."

Even with this help, making a good Mario level requires putting a lot of time into trial and error. There are a few early creators who seem to have mastered the art already, and I think that number is only going to increase as the world goes through the platform-game equivalent of a million monkeys at a million typewriters.