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Nintendo's 'Mario Maker' Gives a Nod to DIY Game Mods

If the new game's more complex stages look familiar to you, it’s because Nintendo has in recent years acknowledged the home-brew and hacking communities by shutting them down and “riffing” on their ideas.
Image: Nintendo

A new game from Nintendo lets you build your own Mario. Which is great. Thing is, this has been going on for years in the shadows of the Internet.

It’s E3 week and all major videogame developers are unveiling new software lineups for the holiday season and beyond. And Nintendo's Mario Maker, a level creation and sharing platform for creating classic Super Mario Bros. levels, is a clear standout.

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The game looks great. It's a simple interface for use with the Wii U Pad that allows you to quickly create, modify, and play levels of your own creation, placing enemies and power ups along the way. It appears you can even adjust the physics of power-ups, as the skinny mushroom shows in the trailer below.

Nintendo has actually played with the idea before. The original concept for Legend of Zelda was all about players creating their own dungeons and sharing them with other players. In 2010, Nintendo released WarioWare: D.I.Y. for the DS which allowed players to create their own mini-games.

So if Mario Maker’s more complex stages look familiar to you, it’s because Nintendo has in recent years acknowledged the home-brew and hacking communities by shutting them down and “riffing” on their ideas, a legal ouroboros that I don’t want to divulge into, the major casualty being Justin Goldberg’s FullScreenMario, which in addition to flexing the aspect ratio of the original game, gave players level editing tools. (For the record, Goldberg thinks Mario Maker looks suspiciously familiar, as the Washington Post reports.)

But of all the Mario modders, one man stands supreme. T. Takemoto, whose dark magic I profiled last year, has created some of the most beautiful Mario creations that even Nintendo cannot accomplish. His work of elaborate, stunningly complex levels, masochistically difficult, stand as monuments to level design. They show just how well this talented designer understands the gameplay components of Mario.

If Takemoto isn’t working on Mario Maker—which some have been so bold to say "could be a Minecraft killer"—he ought to be. Like Minecraft, games that actively engage their community have proven to be incredibly important to game culture. They promote game literacy, especially for young players who can’t always see through the seams of other, more elaborate games. Who could prove the value of this type of Mario game better than it’s most masterful homebrew designer?