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How Nintendo made Super Mario Bros. Wonder so weird

An inside look at the process.

Thanks to magical flowers that, once collected, introduce some unexpected new element, players experience everything from a bunch of Piranha Plants simultaneously bursting into song to Mario turning into a sentient pile of goo. According to producer Takashi Tezuka, who has worked on the franchise since the original Super Mario Bros., the game had not only a large development team but also an extended ideation process for coming up with those different wonder flower concepts. They were able to whittle down the list by coming up with criteria for what would actually fit the game: for an idea to work, it had to have some kind of connection between the moment before the effect takes place, and it had to be something that impacted the gameplay.

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