Take a look at the history of Super Mario games, and the whole franchise starts to seem like a dare that got out of hand, where one guy at Nintendo dared another one—Shigeru Miyamoto, probably— to come up with the most ridiculous thing a plumber can do, and put it in video game. That isn't what happened, of course, but looking at Mario games—in one, he's storming a castle to save a Princess, next, he's in freaking outer space—and it's a tempting theory. Even more so with the latest game in the plumber's long-running adventures, Super Mario Odyssey.

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Out this Friday, Odyssey takes Mario on what Nintendo is pitching as his grandest adventure yet, full of sprawling, open worlds that aren't afraid of skewing towards the slightly weird—like in New Donk City, a modern metropolis-style city where Mario looks the same but everyone else is proportioned... well, like real people. It also gives Mario a surreal new power—when his hat gets possessed by a ghost named Cappy, it grants Mario the ability to possess other creatures and things in the world by merely throwing his hat at them. It's a weird stroke of genius that allows for a more interesting, fun game that tickles both kids in its simplicity and adults in its hilarious strangeness. The sort of thing that Nintendo seems to do accidentally—but at this point, we should probably know better.

To talk a little bit more about Super Mario Odyssey, I spoke with the game's director, Kenta Motokura, along with producer and Nintendo executive Yoshiaki Koizumi, about Mario's newest, strangest adventure, and wanted to know: What's it going to take to keep Bowser from kidnapping the same poor woman every damn time?

GQ: Since Mario games are often so different, what, in your mind, do Mario games do that others don't?

Yoshiaki Koizumi: One thing we're always very focused on is that there's always a rich variety of things in every Mario game. Every Mario game has a diversity of things to offer.

Kenta Motokura: For me, what's always important for a Mario game is that it has to be something that's fun [the moment you touch it]. There's just an instant fun right when you pick up the controls. From there we add lots of different actions and gameplay elements when we create a game, but that's something that's always there, that idea of fun.

You've got all sorts of strange and different new environments in this game—how do you know when you've found an idea for a place that's fun for players?

Motokura: First it starts with all these different prototypes—we have all these different ideas, and we try to choose the best ones to build a stage. And once we have a stage coming together, we start to think about what kind of setting makes sense for this stage. What kind of style makes sense? So if there's a gameplay idea that involves Mario walking on a slippery surface, we'll say Okay, this idea fits into a snowy kingdom or an icy kingdom. Or if we have a level that makes use of Mario's jumping—what if we make use of a realistic city like New York?

How did you come up with the idea of Cappy, this hat that possesses things?Motokura: At the beginning of development, one of the themes impressed on us by Mr. Koizumi was using the Joy-Con for different player actions. One thing that was very natural was the idea of throwing something. So we chose something that was already familiar to players for Mario to throw, so that they would have a sense of empathy and a sense of connection—we decided Mario would just throw his own cap.