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Source: You must login or register to view this content. // By: 420 // April 3rd, 2011.
The very beloved Super Mario Brothers 2 came about through an experimental idea. Nintendo was playing around with a concept which they called 'vertical platforming'.
Kensuke Tanabe, Donkey Kong Country Returns producer and Super Mario Bros. 2 director , stated,"The idea was that you would have people vertically ascending, and you would have items and blocks that you could pile up to go higher, or you could grab your friend that you were playing with and throw them to try and continue to ascend. The game was mocked up (so that) when the player climbed about two-thirds of the way up the screen, it would scroll so that the player was pushed further down."
This technology was followed up by a problematic prototype: the problem being the lack of fun. Shigeru Miyamoto said that adding the traditional Mario-style side-scrolling would change things up. Eventually, this concept began to develop into Super Mario Bros 2. Tanabe said, "Picking up blocks was the same thing as pulling out vegetables from the ground." This vertical platforming concept was released in a game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic. While that game was still in development, Fuji Television made a deal with Nintendo. Fuji now had Nintendo's permission to release a game featuring characters for the Yume Kojo technology expo.
Lastly, the format was converted from Famicom Disk System to Cartridge for Western release. However, Nintendo did a couple of tweaks on it's own to the final release. Tanabe stated,"We knew these Fuji TV characters wouldn't be popular in America, but what would be attractive in America would be the Mario characters." With that, Super Mario Brothers 2 was released. I found this very interesting because it was a childhood game of mine, and I never knew this before.
It was clever of Nintendo changing the characters. In my opinion, it was a genius marketing idea as it worked so well. The two games are strikingly similar, but that little change of characters made a huge difference.