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Our Super Mario Bros Wonder review likens the stellar platformer to "your first magical visit to Disneyland," so I was caught off guard when one of its developers casually shared one of the most horrifying ideas I've ever heard: "an eight-heads-tall, life-sized, live-action Mario."
We can thank sound director Koji Kondo for this mental image. As the Wonder team explained in an Ask the Developer interview posted to the main Nintendo website, the game's design leads regularly solicited gameplay ideas from everyone on the team no matter their tenure or area of focus, which is how they ended up with over 2,000 sticky notes of inspiration. Kondo says "I also contributed a lot of suggestions at the idea-sharing session," and for better and worse, one of them never saw the light of day.
"I shared the idea of an eight-heads-tall, life-sized, live-action Mario humming along with the background music as he goes along," Kondo says, with the energy of someone dropping a cinder block on a stone floor in a quiet room. Even the article's interviewer is stunned: "Eight-heads-tall, life-sized Mario?!" they reply, neatly echoing my reaction.
"Yes," Kondo asserts as if to assure us we didn't mishear his batshit idea. "When he jumps, he says to himself, 'Boing!' ...The idea was never used, though."
"I felt I had to take the lead in going to the extreme," he says, and that certainly is an extreme.
I'm trying to picture this idea fitting into Super Mario Bros Wonder and it feels like trying to describe the unknowable face of an Eldritch being that exists outside the realms of human perception. First of all, "eight heads" is probably the grisliest unit of measurement Kondo could've used here, because now I can't shake the thought of eight severed Mario heads stacked up like a cactus Pokey or a Goomba tower.
Assuming it is just a really tall Mario, seemingly doing Really Tall Mario things in the background while normal Mario actually plays through Wonder's levels, that just leaves me envisioning one of those hyper-realistic illustrations that seem to follow Nintendo IP everywhere, which frankly isn't much better.
Realistic Mario from r/gaming
I'm simultaneously disappointed and relieved that this idea wasn't used. In any case, thanks for the nightmares, Kondo.
Mario has a new voice actor in Wonder, and his credits are just as obscure as original actor Charles Martinet's were back in the '90s.
