It’s 1989. Super Mario mania is running wild on the back of the Super Mario Bros. series on the NES. Nintendo launches their Game Boy and it has a Super Mario game.
Super Mario Land was the first main Mario title not designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It showed.
That’s not to say it was a bad game. Reactions vary. We’ll get to the Game Boy later.
The point is that things were different on handheld. The rules of the console series didn’t have to apply. Yes, Mario jumped on the heads of baddies, but he also had his own submarine and spaceship. The princess was called Daisy, not Peach. Tatanga, an alien, was the main bad guy, not Bowser.
The handheld series was able to deviate, and with Super Mario Land 2 we got Mario’s frenemy. Evil Mario, known as Wario. The character has been a mainstay in the Nintendo line-up ever since.
The character made that much of an impression that he became the focus of the Mario Land series. So much so that the next sequel was Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Wario Land got three sequels: Wario Land 2 (Game Boy, 1998), Wario Land 3 (Game Boy Color, 2000), and Wario Land 4 (Game Boy Advance, 2001).
Each Wario Land brought with it a new gimmick, be that Metroidvania-style exploration or puzzles where you had to transform into different forms. But at their core, these were a set of Nintendo-published 2D platform games, using handheld systems as their platform of choice.
Wario has always felt like Nintendo’s “test the water” character.
I admit that at this point I too had followed the 3D wave of gaming. I was playing Ridge Racer and Time Crisis. My GameCube had Resident Evil, Mario Sunshine and Luigi’s Mansion. I only discovered that Nintendo’s 2D platforming tradition had continued later on when these titles became available on the Nintendo eShop.
It raises the question: would a 2D platformer have sold well during that era? There were some good ones, as I recall, over on Sony’s PlayStation. Rayman and Earthworm Jim 2 spring to mind.
Would I have paid full price for a 2D platform game in the early 2000s? I honestly couldn’t answer that.
But the handheld market was evolving too. Nintendo made the decision to end the long-running Game Boy line of consoles, launching what would become the best-selling handheld console family of all time.
Everyone had a Nintendo DS. Your elderly aunt had a DS. Your grandad had a DS. I can’t understate how massive the Nintendo DS and its brain-training craze became.
With such a big player base, the conditions were just right for Nintendo to chase those golden coins again with their biggest attraction. Wario was stood aside, the brothers were back.
Next time, we look at the games themselves.