Justifying the existence of New Super Mario Bros.
New Super Mario Bros., as a series, is stuck in neutral. The games function well enough and there is fun to be had, but if you’ve played one, you’ve played them all. That couldn’t be said about the games in the ‘80s. That’s the problem right there: Nintendo has become complacent, implementing only incremental upgrades from game to game. In the latest Iwata Asks, the team behind New Super Mario Bros. 2 talked about the Mario Cram School, where employees from several different departments come to learn how to create 2D Mario levels. It would appear to me the Mario Cram School needs to offer some extra courses, because the students have been turning in the same assignment for the past seven years.
Nintendo is obviously doing this intentionally. One could hardly accuse them of being lazy as a game designers, and NSMB, for what it is, remains incredibly well-polished compared to what everyone else is putting out.
Here’s my theory on this: NSMB is not for Mario fans.
The mainline Mario series is for Mario fans, of course. By ‘mainline’, I mean Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D Land: the games that inherited directly in the line of succession from Super Mario 64; the ones that try all of the fun new ideas that Miyamoto and his team come up with. And by ‘Mario fans’, I mean the people who have been following these games the entire time, who have played all (or most) of them as they have been released. Mario fans are the ones who never gave up on Mario, never got bored of it, never grew out of it.
I think all Mario fans know intuitively, without having to be instructed, which games are the ‘real’ Mario games, and which ones are a side-show. I don’t think they need it explained to them that New Super Mario Bros. Wii was not a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy.
I think Mario fans aren’t necessarily expected to buy and play every NSMB when it comes out, if ever. Why would they? There’s very little new or exciting in any of them. And thus, the ‘New’ in New Super Mario Bros. is ironic in a way that I’m not sure Nintendo intended: the thing that distinguishes them is that there is nothing new about them. The only reason for the fans, the people who have seen it all before, to play a game like NSMB is for a quick dose of indulgent, low-nutrition nostalgia, before they move onto their next ‘serious’ game.1
And why must Nintendo cater this particular series to that particular audience, anyway? They already have a series tailored for them: the mainline series. No, NSMB is made for a different audience: one whose attention Nintendo has been trying to gain for some time now.
Walk around the entertainment department at Target, and what do you see? This, for $149:
NSMB exists to be a system-seller to people who played NES or SNES many years ago, and have never picked up a Nintendo game since. It’s for the ones that got away. It’s Nintendo standing in that aisle with open arms, saying, ‘Hey, remember us? Remember how much fun you used to have with us? You can have literally that exact same kind of fun again, right now.’ And then, once this person owns the system, Nintendo has their foot in the door–’You know, we’ve made some other games recently… they’re not quite the same as you remember, but they’re fun too…’
I think Nintendo has found, with the first two NSMB titles, that this is working, and that they need a NSMB game on every Nintendo console in order to sell to these people. This is sort of like the blue ocean strategy, but slightly modified: instead of reaching out to people who have never played video games, Nintendo is trying to get people to come back, who used to be customers but haven’t been in a long time. And I think it says something about the popularity of the SNES that this is the specific period of time in history that Nintendo chose to focus on.
And that’s why we’re seeing two NSMB games, one for 3DS and one for Wii U, coming out so close to each other. Mario fans are not expected to buy both of them, or even one of them. If they do, great, but it’s not for them. It’s to sell the consoles to people who wouldn’t otherwise buy into the platform at all.
Why can’t NSMB appeal to both audiences? Quite simply, you can’t please everyone. If I’m right, Nintendo believes there is a large number of ex-Mario fans out there who got lost somewhere along the way. If Super Mario Galaxy was already winning them back, then NSMB wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. One way to look at this is that we should be happy that Nintendo decided to create a new series, rather than ‘dumbing down’ the mainline series. And yet I doubt they would ever seriously consider such a thing–not while Miyamoto’s influence still lingers.
So no, NSMB never was, and never will be, a stroke of Miyamoto’s masterwork. And, guys, this is okay. Just like the industry making more games as a whole means there will be a larger quantity of bad or mediocre ones, there’s no reason that would diminish the quality of the really good games. This is evidence of the market expanding, which logically should be a good thing for Nintendo. And by extension, what’s good for Nintendo is good for Mario fans. One would hope.
- For what it’s worth, I occasionally enjoy playing the NSMB games–just not as much as I enjoy the mainline series. ↩︎