Super Mario Bros. Wonder almost featured a realistic Mario and surfing

Last year, Nintendo brought Mario back to his 2D roots with a surprise new game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The critically acclaimed platformer was an instant crowd-pleaser thanks in no small part to its namesake feature, Wonder Effects. These power-ups completely transformed Mario’s world, letting its developers experiment with wacky ideas from wiggling pipes to singing Piranha Plants.

The notoriously secretive Nintendo has now peeled back the curtain on how those creative swings came to be. The company hosted a panel about the game’s development at this year’s Game Developers Conference. In it, Producer Takashi Tezuka and Director Shiro Mouri went in depth about how it built Wonder Effects. The panel included some wild ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor – enough to fill a sequel.

According to Mouri, a big part of the team’s original design vision was to call back to the secret-filled world of the original Super Mario Bros. Though Mouri’s first proposed twist planted the seeds for what would become Wonder Effects, Tezuka would push him to turn the idea up a notch.

“I thought about creating a new version of these secrets and mysteries,” Mouri said. “I tried making something where if you hit a block, a special item comes out, and if you take this item, you can go to another area. When I showed that to Mr. Tezuka, he said, ‘This isn’t so different from how it’s always been. Can’t you make it so that instead of going to another area, the environment itself changes?’ So I said, if I’m going to change the environment anyway, I might as well go hard.”

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Mouri would get to work on his first radical ideas for the game. He’d start by creating a wiggling green pipe that moved around like an inchworm. If you’ve played Super Mario Bros. Wonder, you might