Why Super Mario Galaxy is a wake-up call for developers

Don’t hide behind just one good idea

There are a lot of brilliant games around at the moment. More than we’ve had at one time in years in fact. But all too often we find ourselves playing through highly polished versions of what has gone before. Games have always been a medium of refinement rather than revolution, but they’re also a medium capable of any kind of interactive experience programmable. Over recent years however we’ve seen that potential wasted on a set of unswerving genres containing but a few token tweaks and cross-overs.

Super Mario Galaxy is a platform game, yes, but it’s unafraid to blow conventions out of the water and start working with the concept all over again from the most base level. It’s essentially the Half-Life 2 of platform games, and like Valve’s masterpiece, it achieves that by having no pre-conceptions of what it should be doing.

Much like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario Galaxy is happy to mix things up on a whim for the hell of it, because the designers have simply thrown in the ideas they’ve had just to see what would happen. Some ideas it uses a lot, some it uses only once, but all are used well and the approach keeps the player’s interest far better than taking a safer but more conventional approach ever could.

If it sounds fun, screw the rules. Just try it and and see if it is.

Now click play to see that philosophy in action.

There are a lot of brilliant games around at the moment. More than we’ve had at one time in years in fact. But all too often we find ourselves playing through highly polished versions of what has gone before. Games have always been a medium of refinement rather than revolution, but they’re also a medium capable of any kind of interactive experience programmable. Over recent years however we’ve seen that potential wasted on a set of unswerving genres containing but a few token tweaks and cross-overs.

Super Mario Galaxy is a platform game, yes, but it’s unafraid to blow conventions out of the water and start working with the concept all over again from the most base level. It’s essentially the Half-Life 2 of platform games, and like Valve’s masterpiece, it achieves that by having no pre-conceptions of what it should be doing.

Much like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario Galaxy is happy to mix things up on a whim for the hell of it, because the designers have simply thrown in the ideas they’ve had just to see what would happen. Some ideas it uses a lot, some it uses only once, but all are used well and the approach keeps the player’s interest far better than taking a safer but more conventional approach ever could.

If it sounds fun, screw the rules. Just try it and and see if it is.

Now click play to see that philosophy in action.