How Do Professional Game Designers Feel About 'Super Mario Maker'?

Mathew Kumar, a game developer, feels a little been-there-done-that with Super Mario Maker, Nintendo's anticipated DIY Mario adventure.

Kumar's latest, Knight & Damsel, an anti-cooperative multiplayer game where a princess and an armoured adventurer race to save the other, spins Mario's classic quest in obvious thematic ways. But the influence of Shigeru Miyamoto's beloved series is rooted deeper than that. "Mario has taught me, more than any other game, on designing levels," said Kumar.

When Kumar was designing levels for 2012's Sound Shapes, someone brought in a Japanese strategy guide to the original Super Mario Bros. games. Kumar was inspired by the Mushroom Kingdom, and so he started cutting up moments from Super Mario Bros. and reordering them—much like the new release from Nintendo that lets players build their own levels out of the series iconic set of obstacles.

Kumar said these games are full of "teaching moments," and the reason the first minute of many Mario games are etched into your mind is because they often educated you about their world, built to remember. Even though the levels have repetitive elements, "there's always a sense of surprise" in Mario, he said.

In 1985, Super Mario Bros. was revolutionary, one of the fastest side-scrolling games and introduced the world to a sense of motion previously unseen, not to mention video games' most famous moustachioed icon. But the legacy of Mario wouldn't hold any weight if it wasn't supported by its excellent gallery of levels. Coin blocks. Pipes that may house carnivorous plants. Ghosts that freeze when you face them. As you progress, jumps get bigger, enemy confrontations get tenser, and secrets get sneakier.

At first, the idea of Super Mario Maker didn't captivate me. The concept just seemed like Nintendo capitalizing on the player-made frenzy that's made blockbusters out of LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft, or meeting those nightmare level mods at the pass. That flipped during the Nintendo World Championship demo. It dawned how perfect Mario's world is for this kind of experience: elements of a game that many of us have completely internalized, turned into a toolset, that can be stretched, skewed and mutated into brand new stages that can challenge, inspire, nauseate, or all of the above.

I spoke with contemporary game makers, like Kumar, about the lasting impact of Super Mario's worlds and the appeal of Mario Maker.

"There's a timeless quality to the Mario levels, and I think all that comes down to a really elegant design sensibility," said Erin Robinson, creator of the cosmic platformer Gravity Ghost. "Any one object in the game can have a number of different properties: carryable, stompable, collectible, dangerous, etc. And often, these special properties affect not just Mario, but other characters and objects as well. Think about how much more interesting a level becomes when a POW block is carryable. I think it makes the world feel really solid and tactile in a way that even modern games struggle to match."

Mario Maker lets you take this malleability to the extreme, she said. "The game asks questions like, 'What if a cannon could spawn any kind of object, not just a dangerous one? What if it could spawn collectibles?' That opens up a really cool design space that's not even available in the full versions of the game. I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with."

For Kyle Reimergartin, creator of Fjords, a PC game which is entirely about letting players break the game, believes the pacing of Super Mario Bros. is "incredible."

"You start with this gentle overland romp, light some monsters on fire, plunge underground, get money, climb some trees, charge into a castle—the run-up to (King) Koopa is an amazing, suspenseful, pregnant thing itself—there are so many actual surprises."

He dismisses the warp zones that let you teleport between worlds, however, as "a horrid practice that has ruined the mindfulness of Mario for me."

"I will totally get Mario Maker," he said. "I can design Mario 64-like run and jump arounds for my daughter to hang out in, because sometimes you just want to run and jump and not have to not die. I mean, I watch her approach a Goomba and it is the scariest thing. She stops a good four inches away and just waits for it to approach her. It is a very stressful couple of seconds… I think the game could hold a lot more 'actual fun' and 'not terror' for her. I am also excited to fill levels with illogical pipes and starry backgrounds."

Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns of Metanet, who have also prioritized user creation and created homages to Mario in N++, their latest game for PlayStation 4, pre-ordered their copy of Mario Maker.

"We're so excited to get our hands on it," said Sheppard. "We know from seeing what players make in N++ that people can be incredibly creative in their use of objects and enemies. Our favourites in N++ often include 'Don't Do Anything' maps, where the player is bounced and shunted around the level automatically via the physics and collision of the game's objects—there are close calls and near deaths, which makes it really exciting to watch. We can't wait to see some of those in Mario Maker!" For the record, the two of them say their favourite levels are the ghost houses from Super Mario World.

Kumar is a little skeptical of Super Mario Maker, however. Word on the street is that many users aren't exactly masters of level-making like Nintendo, but moreover while this game supplies users with an accessible tool kit, it might not teach the nuances of level design as well as the previous games have illustrated them. To him, Super Mario Bros. 3, from its climactic introduction in The Wizard to its lingering legacy, is the pinnacle of 2D platforming.

Erin Robinson, meanwhile, had recently become interested in gaming-as-performance stunts after watching Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedruns. She likes the ideas of the hellish "impossible" levels being brought to players en masse, instead of just through hacks. Kyle Reimergartin leans the other way, looking forward to building lazy river levels with his young daughter in mind.

Me? I'm going to pick it up, but I'm not promising I'll make any levels. I'm not calling myself a game designer, just ask my never-finished LittleBigPlanet 2 puppy-themed Lovecraft stage, "Tales of the Necrodoggycon." But I'm all for seeing what you goofs come up with.