Astro Bot is a confectionary PlayStation adventure, but it's also a meat and potatoes platformer. As such, its developers felt they had to thank the godfather of platformers, Nintendo, during their Game of the Year acceptance speech at The Game Awards.
"We made a platformer," Astro Bot creative director Nicolas Doucet said, "it's very nostalgic and fresh at the same time. But let us not forget that, even before PlayStation, there were people making platformers."
"I remember, I was a kid in 1989," Doucet continued. He got a "gray box" for Christmas; you might know it better as the NES. He found Super Mario Bros. packed inside his present and decided that, as generations of eager gamers have decided after him, the fantasy platformer actually "was really, really great."
While Astro Bot — with its PS5 shine and glossy, robot world — isn't a Mario successor, visually or mechanically, it does share the same friendly spirit as the all-ages Nintendo franchise.
"We are in Japan, we are in Tokyo," Doucet said during his Game Awards speech, referring to the Astro Bot team, "they are in Kyoto, but I want to pay tribute to the company who really [...] showed us innovation and quality consistently, and inspired us to actually make the game that we made."
Doucet laughs that he can't say the developer's name outright, but Nintendo is headquartered in Kyoto and breathed life into little mustachioed Mario, so we can make a good guess here.
"You all know who they are," Doucet concluded. "We want to pay tribute to them tonight."
