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Super Mario World's Historical Context

Our first step in studying Super Mario World is to understand the game’s
historical context. The Mario series, though it seems safe and conservative now,
began a revolutionary trend in videogame design. Before 1985, videogames
were generally designed according to one central principle, what I call Nishikado
motion. Nishikado motion describes the way that difficulty in a mainstream
videogame rises and falls in a regular fashion. The phenomenon is named for
Tomohiro Nishikado, who discovered it (serendipitously) in his masterwork,
Space Invaders (1978). In that game, the enemy aliens start the level by moving
slowly, and then get progressively faster before resetting with a slight uptick in
difficulty when the next level begins.

The graph above visualizes Nishikado motion as it occurs in Space Invaders and
thousands of other games. This kind of ebb and flow in game difficulty is still, to
this day, the central principle of videogame design. That said, videogames have
evolved a lot since then. In the arcade era, designers achieved Nishikado motion
through control over one or two variables. For example, Space Invaders gets
harder when the enemies get faster. In Asteroids (1979), the game gets more
difficult when there are more asteroids on screen, and those asteroids move
faster. Most arcade games operated similarly.

Aside from Nishikado motion, the only other major development in the arcade era
was the invention of the powerup. At first, powerups were little more than a way
to push the difficulty of a game up or down. For example, the famous two-ships
powerup in Galaga (1981) doubles the player’s firepower, and results in a
concomitant decrease in difficulty. In Pac-Man (1980), the benefits conveyed by
the “energizer” powerup make the game easier for a few moments, but the length
of the powerup’s effect gradually decays across the course of the game. These

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powerups were fun, but they were really just back doors into control of the
difficulty.

The first powerup to radically change videogame design was the invention of a
young Shigeru Miyamoto. Donkey Kong (1981), in which Mario first appears (as
“Jump Man”), opened a different evolutionary path for powerups. The hammer
powerup in Donkey Kong doesn’t simply enhance Jump Man’s abilities
quantitatively, it changes their nature qualitatively. When he obtains the hammer,
Jump Man loses his jumping and climbing abilities and gains the ability to attack
enemies with a weapon. Essentially, the game temporarily stops being a
platformer and starts being an action game. The game does not abandon
Nishikado motion; rather, it adds to it. We can visualize it like so:

The y-axis still represents a quantitative measure of difficulty; I call it the axis of
obstacles. Donkey Kong added a new axis, one that represents the qualitative
changes of a game moving between two genres. I call this the axis of abilities.
The back-and-forth movement between genres, unified with Nishikado motion,
created a new phenomenon and led to the invention (and eventual dominance) of
composite games.

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A composite game is one in which a player can use the mechanics and
abilities of one genre to solve the problems of another genre, making it a
composite of two videogame genres. The first game to exhibit all the features
of a modern composite game was Super Mario Bros. in 1985, which is both a
platformer and an action game. In the case of Super Mario Bros., the player uses
platforming game mechanics (jumping) to solve action game problems (defeating
enemies). The act of jumping on the head of a Goomba to defeat it typifies the
intersection of genres that makes Super Mario Bros. so great. The hallmark of
composite design is not just a mash-up of genres stretched across the course of
a game, but rather the particular way in which the genres are combined. In a
composite game, the game’s challenges bounce back and forth between the two
genres. In Super Mario Bros., this means that the game tends to alternate
between platform-intensive levels with lots of open jumps and action-intensive
levels that feature more enemies and more combat. The game never stops being
both a platformer and an action game, but it tends to alternate its focus between
those two genres so that players never get bored of just one kind of activity. This
back-and-forth motion between genres leads to a high and sustainable level of
engagement that I call composite flow. This kind of flow is not the same as
traditional psychological flow, but its consciousness-consuming effects are
analogous.

In the early days of the composite game (1985 to about 1993), level design was
generally defined by powerups that emphasized one genre or another, and Super
Mario World is a good example of this trend. Super Mario Bros. had only one
frequently-used powerup that worked as a genre-shifter—the fire-flower—but it’s
remarkable how often that powerup appears in levels where there are lots of
enemies to defeat and not a lot of space to defeat them. In essence, the fire-
flower reinforces the level’s emphasis on action and combat. This design trend
was true for most classic games of the era, in fact. Think of how Metroid or
Mega-Man titles featured powerups that defined the levels in which they
appeared, and you can see how designers let powerups guide their design.
Super Mario World is one of the most essential examples of this kind of level
design philosophy in action, as it uses two powerups (the feather and cape) to
emphasize one side of the genre composite over another in any given level.

Powerup Declensions and the Evolution of Mario Games

When we talk about a level or section of a level in a composite game that

emphasizes one genre more than the other, we’re talking about that level’s

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declension. (I.e., that level or section declines or “leans” toward one genre, but
never abandons either genre.) Typically, the declension of each successive level
is different, especially early in a Mario game. If the previous level was a
platforming-intensive level, it’s likely the current level is going to emphasize
action, and vice versa. This is not to say that the Mario team never explored how
the level designs themselves could express a genre declension because they
frequently did, and we’ll see that later in this book.

For the most part, however, Mario games before 1995 shaped their levels around
powerups. Super Mario Bros. 3 is most interesting for the way it uses a huge
variety of powerups to achieve the back-and-forth motion of composite flow.
Between the fire-flower, raccoon/tanuki tail, wings, Tanuki suit, frog suit, hammer
suit, super star, and Kuribo’s shoe, the designers were able to push powerup-
driven composite design to its logical limit. We can think of Super Mario Bros. 3
as being the game in which the Mario creators experimented freely with
powerups. That experimental attitude resulted in some truly weird and beautiful
levels that people still admire today. That weirdness also had some drawbacks in
terms of approachability, though. Some levels were much more difficult or more
confusing than others.

If Super Mario Bros. 3 was Mario at his oddest and most experimental, Super
Mario World is Mario at his most organized and refined. Super Mario World has
fewer powerups than Super Mario Bros. 3, in order to implement a
straightforward type of genre-based organization. I visualize that organization in
the figure below.

Want to read more? The rest of this section can be found in

the print and eBook versions.

Page 3: Measurements and Their Meanings

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