How Super Mario 3D Land Was Made

Galaxy would not fit in a pocket

After Super Mario Galaxy 2, Koichi Hayashida did not want to make another game that was just as densely packed. He compared Galaxy 2 to a magical tablecloth that serves an endless feast: there were so many ideas and mechanics that you could not sample everything in a single sitting.

Before 3D Land, Hayashida and his colleagues had never worked on games for handheld systems. His commute gave him the idea for the future level format: the office was only a few train stops away. He decided that a player should be able to complete an entire level in that amount of time. That was why Hayashida compared 3D Land to a hamburger you could eat quickly.

The job of turning that idea into a game fell to Nintendo's Tokyo office, which had opened in Asakusabashi in July 2003. Takao Shimizu and Yoshiaki Koizumi moved there from Kyoto; they were joined by other Nintendo employees and new specialists hired in Tokyo. Before 3D Land, the Tokyo office had made Donkey Kong Jungle Beat and both Galaxy games.

Nintendo never gave an exact date for when development began. Koizumi said the main direction took shape between the summer and autumn of 2010, and a simple prototype already existed by the autumn. Miyamoto estimated the whole process at roughly two years: at first only two people were working on the game, while by the end the development staff had grown to around thirty. That estimate is still approximate, however, because it is not entirely clear which early experiments Miyamoto counted as part of those two years.

As the number of developers grew, responsibilities were divided up as well. Hayashida was the director: he defined how the core mechanics should work and was responsible for the game's overall tuning. Kenta Motokura led the designers and handled Mario's movement, scripted scenes, and the general outline of the story. Hideyuki Sugawara led the programmers and also programmed enemies himself, including Bowser and the Goombas. Daisuke Tsujimura coordinated the planners and helped turn staff suggestions into elements of the finished game. Yoshiaki Koizumi was the producer.

Why 3D Mario needed the Goal Pole

Short levels suited a commute, but on their own they did not make 3D Mario easier to understand. Many fans of the 2D games did not play the 3D entries: in open space, it was harder for them to tell where to go and where Mario would land.

Nintendo had already run into this problem while working on Galaxy 2. The Japanese release even included a tutorial DVD. This time, however, Hayashida wanted to avoid a separate lesson and make the space itself easier to read. So 3D Land kept freedom of movement while also giving the player a clear point of reference.

The most visible point of reference was the Goal Pole. Nintendo had already tried adding one to Super Mario 64, but that game's broad worlds were built around searching for Stars, and an obvious finish line got in the way of exploration. In 3D Land, the Goal Pole stood at the end of a short route that took Mario either to the right or deeper into the screen. The player could see the goal in advance, while arrows and fences kept them from getting lost. Hidden Star Medals still rewarded players for exploring the levels.

The Goal Pole did more than mark the finish. Miyamoto suggested raising the flag only to the height at which Mario touched the pole. He had wanted to do this in the original Super Mario Bros. but had not been able to. A quarter of a century later, the flag's height became a reward for a precise final jump.

A clear route answered only the first question, however: where to go. To understand where Mario would land, the player also needed a better sense of depth. That was where the 3DS screen helped. In one technical experiment, the developers ran the Whomp's Fortress area from Super Mario 64 in stereoscopic 3D. The isolated floating level did not require complicated processing, but it let the developers test the main point: did 3D make it easier to judge the distance to platforms? The experiment worked — with 3D enabled, their positions were indeed easier to read.

The two solutions complemented each other. The linear route and Goal Pole showed where to go, while stereoscopic 3D helped the player understand where Mario would land. The next task was to fill that clear route with short challenges that would not repeat themselves.

At first, there was a cube instead of Mario

By the autumn of 2010, the developers had a simple prototype with terrain, coins, and blocks. Mario was not in it yet — the player character was a plain square block. It let the developers test the character's position relative to the environment.

But correctly placing the character, blocks, and coins was not enough; the test area still had to become a complete level. To understand how to lead the player from the first challenge to the last, Hayashida revisited the Mario games for NES and broke their levels down into individual design techniques. While preparing lessons for Nintendo Game Seminar, he also organized his work notes on Miyamoto's approach to game design. Hayashida later applied some of the rules he formulated then to 3D Land.

One rule concerned level structure. Each level was built around a single main idea: first the player encountered it in a safe place, then used it in a more difficult situation. An unexpected twist followed, and the final obstacle tested the skill the player had learned. Hayashida compared this rhythm to the Japanese structure of ki-sho-ten-ketsu: introduction, development, twist, and conclusion.

A clear structure made it easier to develop and test ideas quickly, which was especially important under a tight deadline. At first, the demand to finish the game as soon as possible was taken literally: cutscenes were shortened and bosses were dropped. But simply cutting things did not make the remaining levels better. Hayashida changed the approach. Instead of rejecting whole parts of the game in advance, the developers would test ideas quickly and keep only those that produced interesting levels.

To test ideas faster, the developers built trial versions from elements they already had, rearranging and recombining terrain, enemies, and movements. When creating Boomerang Mario, for example, they combined the already-written fireball logic with an enemy's boomerang. If a test version was unimpressive, Hayashida stopped work before anyone could spend several weeks on it.

The Tanooki Suit, which was the only power-up in an early version, was tested the same way. Its tail let Mario attack and slow his fall, and later some enemies were given tails as well. Turning Mario into a statue required separate testing: the developers checked how every enemy reacted to it and whether it allowed the player to bypass parts of a level.

In the early discussions, even deliberately absurd suggestions were not rejected outright. The sketches included a giant Mario, a hero with unnaturally long limbs, and a cockroach that the player would squash by closing the 3DS lid. Sadly, none of those ideas made it into the game.

Selected ideas were added to a new build every day and tested immediately. Even at that pace, however, the Tokyo office needed help. To meet the deadline and release the game for the winter season, Nintendo brought in its subsidiary studio Brownie Brown. Its staff helped with game design and the creation of some levels.

From the first logo to the earthquake: nine days

The first meeting with Brownie Brown was actually still several months away, but Nintendo had already begun to reveal small details about the new Mario. On October 29, 2010, Miyamoto told investors that the company was preparing both a 2D and a 3D Mario game for the 3DS. He said the stereoscopic screen would make it easier to judge the height of a jump. Neither the game's title nor the game itself was shown at the time.

The next detail appeared on March 2, 2011, at the Game Developers Conference. Satoru Iwata showed the first version of the logo for the game being developed by Nintendo's Tokyo office: a tail stuck out from the letter “O.” The company promised to reveal more at E3, and the project still did not have a final title.

Nine days after the logo reveal, Brownie Brown staff visited Nintendo's Tokyo office for the first time. Hayashida began the joint work by breaking down the first level of Galaxy 2: he explained enemy placement and showed how the environment directs the player. In this way, Hayashida introduced the new development participants to the way Nintendo's Tokyo office designed Mario levels.

At 2:46 p.m., the level analysis was interrupted. The conference room on the fifth floor began to sway. Then came a second, even stronger jolt. Several people at the meeting crawled under the tables, and Hayashida followed them. Light fixtures fell from the ceiling, and air ducts were damaged. The building remained standing, but continuing the meeting was impossible.

Development stopped. First, they had to determine whether everyone was safe and how employees would get home.

After the earthquake, the developers gathered around one console

Trains in Tokyo stopped running. Brownie Brown's staff lived near their studio in Kichijoji, on the other side of the city, so the walk home took them seven hours. Several employees from Nintendo's Tokyo office happened to be at the company's headquarters in Kyoto that day and were unable to return for about a week.

The Tokyo office closed for roughly seven days. Strong aftershocks continued, and after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, people feared radiation and power outages. Hayashida hardly left his home, and Nintendo did not know whether development in Tokyo would be able to continue at all.

The office closure exposed another problem: outside work, the developers barely communicated and did not even know one another's personal contact details. The earthquake forced them to change that. They exchanged personal contact information, and one of the developers created a web forum where everyone could communicate and report that they were safe.

While the office remained closed, Hayashida noticed that construction on Tokyo Skytree near his home had resumed. The tower had swayed heavily during the earthquake, but the builders were already back at work. To him, it was a sign that the city was slowly returning to normal.

When the office reopened, Hayashida told the developers that the best thing they could do was release a good game by the end of the year and give people something to enjoy.

After the earthquake, Hayashida was not sure whether he would be able to enjoy his work again. About a month later, one of his colleagues told him that he had entered the game industry because making games was fun. Those words reminded Hayashida of his first game, the Famicom fighting game Joy Mech Fight, which he had started making as a student in Nintendo's Game Seminar. He was not being paid for the work, but the process itself fascinated him. Hayashida then decided to make working on 3D Land more enjoyable for everyone else as well.

Once a week, the developers gathered in a common area and played through the new levels together. The sessions felt like playing games at a friend's house and brought back some of the old enjoyment of the work. So many people wanted to join that there were not enough chairs. At the same time, the developers noted what needed to be changed or fixed. Changes were made quickly: by the next evening, they could launch a new build and see the result.

Even so, development continued, and on June 7, 2011, E3 visitors were able to play the new Mario for themselves for the first time.

Newcomers showed where the game was unfair

The demo was still called simply Super Mario, but the game was already recognizable: levels ended at the familiar Goal Pole, Tanooki Mario was swinging his tail again, and one stage took place on an airship. More importantly, visitors could test Miyamoto's claim for themselves — with 3D enabled, it became easier to tell where Mario would land. Five months remained until release.

E3 visitors were far from the only people who played 3D Land before release. In Tokyo, the game was given to employees' families and to people who rarely played video games. Hayashida relied very little on questionnaires: he watched a person's face and noticed the moment they became confused or pleased. An office worker from a neighboring building, for example, could not jump across a small gap and eventually used the P-Wing. Tests like these showed where newcomers needed help.

Sometimes the opposite happened: a player deliberately refused the P-Wing because they wanted to overcome a difficult section themselves rather than fly over it. The developers decided to help in a different way: protect Mario from enemies while leaving every obstacle in place. This led to the Invincibility Leaf, which turned him into White Tanooki Mario. The player still had to jump across pits on their own. The P-Wing, by contrast, simply carried Mario to the checkpoint flag or the finish.

Originally, the Invincibility Leaf was going to appear after eight failures and the P-Wing after sixteen, as an extension of the help system from New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Takashi Tezuka decided that waiting eight attempts for help — let alone sixteen — was too long. In the finished game, the two assists appeared after five and ten failures respectively.

The developers also tried to help newcomers through less obvious changes. A coin dropped by a defeated enemy would fly toward Mario on its own so the player did not have to turn back. After a checkpoint, Small Mario became Super Mario, so the next attempt began with a small advantage. The developers also removed what Tezuka called “mean placement” from the regular worlds. Mario might, for example, land from a jump directly in front of an enemy, or a line of coins might lead him straight into one. An experienced player might find that kind of trick interesting, but a newcomer saw it as an unfair trap. Ideas like these were therefore reserved for the Special Worlds.

Mario was allowed to adjust his direction slightly in midair. The movement looked unrealistic, but it let the player correct a jump and land on a Goomba. At Miyamoto's insistence, the developers also restored the Long Jump, which had initially been left out after the “reboot.” Experienced players used it for shortcuts and time attacks.

A month before release, Mario still appeared double

During the same tests, the problem that opened this story appeared again. The 3DS autostereoscopic screen sent slightly different images to the left and right eyes, which the brain combined into a 3D picture. If you never played on the early 3DS models, it is hard to imagine how precisely the console had to be held in front of your eyes and how little you could move your head. Shift even slightly and the image began to double, turning into a blur.

At first, the developers set up the depth as if the screen were a window with the game world beyond it. As long as the console stayed still, the effect looked impressive, but during jumps players instinctively tilted it as they tried to guide Mario toward the right platform. To keep Mario from doubling during those movements, Motokura proposed early in development that he be aligned with the reference plane — the depth at which the left- and right-eye images coincide. But when they tested the idea, objects in front of Mario seemed to protrude too far out of the screen and strained the eyes. So the idea was abandoned at the time.

Less than a month before development wrapped, Miyamoto pointed them toward a solution. He drew the developers' attention to the fact that the kart in Mario Kart 7 barely doubled even when the player moved the console. Hayashida launched the game and realized why: the vehicle sat on the reference plane, and it was what the player looked at almost all the time. The developers then remembered Motokura's early proposal to make Mario the same kind of reference point. This time they followed the idea through: they reduced the stereo effect and changed the camera. Mario no longer doubled when the console moved slightly. Around 80 percent of testers found the new Normal View more comfortable. Some players still preferred the old version, however, so Nintendo kept that as well under the name Extended Depth.

The game could also be completed with the 3D slider turned off. Floating coins and blocks always had shadows beneath them, while Mario's own shadow showed where he would land.

Sometimes stereoscopic 3D also affected the structure of the levels themselves. While testing different shapes and textures, the developers noticed that some rooms resembled dungeons from the 2D Zelda games. That is how World 5-2 ended up with a top-down view and similar visual design.

Miyamoto suggested going further and making depth part of a puzzle. Without 3D, certain platforms appeared to sit next to each other, but enabling stereoscopic 3D revealed that they were actually at different depths.

The 3DS screen itself now helped players judge jumps more accurately, so Mario no longer needed Sunshine's Hover Nozzle or Galaxy's Spin. The Tanooki Suit, which slowed his fall, was still kept for newcomers. But stereoscopic 3D did more than help: it also intensified the sense of height. Testers' knees would buckle over deep pits, so the developers adjusted the height of some sections as well.

A game of short levels grew to twice its planned size

While the developers were tuning stereoscopic 3D right up to the final weeks, the game itself kept growing. A single level could still be completed within a few train stops, but while building the regular worlds, the developers accumulated many difficult ideas that could not be shown to newcomers too early. Instead of discarding them, they assembled those ideas into Special Worlds that opened after the regular-world finale.

There ended up being almost as many Special stages as regular ones. Some were built from scratch, while others took familiar levels and made them harder: the screen moved faster, enemies attacked without pauses, and a Cosmic Clone chased Mario. The clone repeated the player's path with a short delay and damaged Mario on contact, forcing the player to keep moving forward.

Luigi, who had a higher jump, could be unlocked in the Special Worlds. Hayashida compared these worlds to the second loop of the original Super Mario Bros., where completed levels became more difficult. Sugawara recalled that by the end of development, the game had grown to roughly twice the size originally planned.

A time-attack mode also opened alongside the Special Worlds. Through StreetPass, players could compare completion times and compete with others at roughly their own skill level. The mode was almost cut because of its complexity, but Koizumi insisted that it be restored. StreetPass also let players exchange Mystery Boxes — short challenges in which all enemies had to be defeated within ten seconds.

The result was a paradox: the developers ruthlessly shortened individual levels so each one could be completed during a brief train ride, yet the full game still ended up nearly twice as long as they had expected.

The final title also appeared only near the end of development. For a while, the developers considered numbered names such as Super Mario 9 or Super Mario 11, following the example of Mario Kart 7. In the end they settled on Super Mario 3D Land. Hayashida thought the word Land may have been influenced by the old Mario Land games, which he had replayed not long before: the new title connected the game to the series' past.

All that remained was the release, in what had already been a difficult first year for the Nintendo 3DS.

“Next time” became 3D World

Super Mario 3D Land launched in Japan on November 3, 2011, in the United States on November 13, and in Europe on November 18. A few months earlier, Nintendo had cut the Japanese price of the 3DS from 25,000 yen to 15,000 yen and prepared several major games for the winter. The company later attributed the recovery in console sales to the price cut and the entire winter lineup rather than to 3D Land alone.

By December 31, 2011, worldwide sales of Super Mario 3D Land had reached 5.03 million copies. It became the first Nintendo 3DS game to pass the five-million mark. By March 31, 2026, sales had risen to 12.89 million copies, including digital versions and copies bundled with consoles.

What succeeded was not a smaller Galaxy, but a distinct 3D Mario formula of its own. The linear route and Goal Pole showed the objective, stereoscopic 3D and shadows helped players judge jumps, and White Tanooki Mario let newcomers keep playing without skipping the level itself. The developers tested these solutions with players and kept changing the game until the final weeks, right down to reworking the camera. Miyamoto suggested saving multiplayer “for next time.” That next time became Super Mario 3D World, where the short 3D levels were designed for four players.