The Story of Super Mario 3D World: Why Nintendo’s Choice Initially Seemed Like a Mistake

The Nintendo 64 Could Not Handle Mario and Luigi Together

Back in the mid-1990s, while working on Super Mario 64, Nintendo tried to make the game playable by two people: one player would control Mario and the other Luigi. In an early prototype, both characters could already run around the same area, but it was still simple and flat. Once the developers moved on to more complex 3D stages, they discovered that the Nintendo 64 did not have enough power to handle both a second character and varied environments at the same time. They had to choose, so the two-player mode was dropped and Luigi was removed from the game.

For Yoshiaki Koizumi, however, the idea remained unfinished. He later recalled that while working on Super Mario 64 he and Shigeru Miyamoto had already discussed a 3D game in which Mario and Luigi could play through levels together, but there was no immediate opportunity to return to the concept. Luigi appeared in Super Mario Galaxy, but only as an additional playable character rather than as a partner for a second player. According to Koizumi, he had to wait about fifteen years for a chance to realize the original idea.

That is why multiplayer in 3D World was not a late addition to an already finished game: the entire project was built around cooperative play from the beginning. But before Nintendo could revisit the old idea on a new home console, the developers had to solve another problem: how to make a 3D Mario game approachable even for people who found it difficult to control both the character and the camera at the same time.

3D Land Became the Foundation for a Four-Player Game

Koichi Hayashida believed that the gap between 2D and 3D Mario games had become too wide. In New Super Mario Bros., players could almost always see the goal ahead and understand where to go. The 3D games offered much more freedom, but that freedom brought new difficulties: players could get lost, choose an awkward camera angle, or misjudge the distance to a platform. Hayashida wanted to preserve the feeling of moving through a 3D space while making the game as easy to read as a classic 2D Mario.

The answer was Super Mario 3D Land for Nintendo 3DS. Its levels became short and mostly linear again, with the familiar flagpole waiting at the end of each one. The camera was often fixed at a carefully chosen angle so the route ahead remained visible. The stereoscopic screen helped players judge depth, but the game was still easy to understand without the 3D effect: shadows showed where airborne objects would land.

The developers already wanted to add cooperative play at the time, but 3D Land remained a single-player game. Its short, linear levels, however, turned out to be unexpectedly well suited to a future multiplayer title. The camera did not constantly rotate around a single character; it showed the route from one general direction, which meant several players could follow the action at once.

Nintendo never gave an exact date for when development began. According to Hayashida, the core ideas were first discussed after Galaxy 2, while the developers were already thinking about a follow-up during work on 3D Land. But inventing cooperative play was one thing; keeping four players on a single screen without anyone getting lost was another.

Four Players and One Camera

The main problem was the camera. In earlier 3D Mario games it followed one character, but now it had to keep four players in view at once without splitting the screen into four small windows.

The developers built on a solution already proven in 3D Land: the camera viewed each level from a defined direction and automatically pulled back as the players spread out. If someone fell too far behind, they entered a bubble and quickly returned to the group. In single-player mode, the angle could be adjusted with the right stick or by moving the GamePad, although doing so was not required to finish the game.

The shared camera directly affected the structure of the levels. In long, narrow corridors, the characters would obscure one another, while in spaces that were too open they could scatter in different directions. The main route was therefore kept in view as much as possible, and important items were placed so players could easily notice them from the chosen angle.

But the camera was only part of the solution. To give each player a distinct play style, Nintendo brought back the character differences from the Western version of Super Mario Bros. 2. Mario had no major strengths or weaknesses, making him equally suitable for any level. Each of the other characters had a clear advantage paired with a corresponding drawback: Luigi jumped higher but slid more; Peach could briefly float in the air but ran more slowly; and Toad was the fastest but had the weakest jump. Every stage was tested with Mario, so the other characters’ special abilities offered more convenient routes but no character was ever required to make progress.

Cooperative play did not mean the players always had to help one another. After each stage, the player with the highest score received a crown, and on the next stage the others could steal it, even though everyone shared the same pool of lives. Over the course of a single session, players might help each other reach a secret and then start fighting right before the flagpole. This mixture of cooperation and friendly rivalry reminded the developers of the arcade Mario Bros.

Mario Got Down on All Fours and Became a Cat

The cat suit, like many other ideas in 3D World, came from constant experimentation. Nintendo EAD Tokyo and 1-Up Studio developed the game together. Yoshiaki Koizumi served as producer, while Kenta Motokura and Koichi Hayashida were the directors. Motokura led day-to-day development, while Hayashida described his own role as closer to that of an adviser. Work began with 40–50 people, and by the end of production roughly one hundred people were involved.

Almost any staff member could suggest a new mechanic or level idea. Every proposal was written on a colored note and pinned to a wall, after which the most interesting concepts were tested in the game as quickly as possible. Whenever everyone on the staff joined the discussion, they generated two to three times as many ideas as on previous projects.

The developers described this principle as “mechanics first.” They would start with a new idea and test it in the game: was it fun to play with, did it create new situations, and could interesting levels be built around it?

As a result, 3D World was not built around one new gimmick. One level focused on shadows cast on a wall, another on moving to the rhythm of the music, and a third on riding Plessie across the water. If an idea worked, the developers found a place for it even if it appeared only once. Instead of stretching a single mechanic across the whole game, they ended up with a sequence of short stages, each with its own rules.

The cat suit emerged from the same process. The developers wanted Mario to run on all fours and climb walls, so they first tested the new movements using the characters’ ordinary models. According to the developers, Mario and Peach crawling on their hands and feet looked rather strange, while the same kind of movement felt natural for an animal. That was why they decided to turn the characters into cats.

The cat suit did more than give the new movements a natural visual identity. Its claw swipe made combat in 3D space easier because players no longer had to land precisely on a small enemy’s head; they could simply strike an enemy in front of them. Wall climbing proved useful for both beginners and experienced players: it gave beginners a chance to recover from a bad jump, while experienced players could use it to take shortcuts, reach a Green Star, or climb to the top of the flagpole.

Most ideas still never made it into the final game. Hayashida joked that out of fifty power-up ideas, only one would survive. It was not meant as an exact statistic, of course, but as a way of showing how strict the selection process was. 3D World became so varied not because the developers tried to preserve every idea, but because they readily discarded anything that did not work.

The Mistake They Decided Not to Fix

Not every mechanic started on a note pinned to the wall. One day, someone accidentally left two Marios in a level in the internal level editor, with both controlled by the same controller. Instead of simply deleting the extra character, the developers tried playing through the stage with both of them and discovered that controlling two Marios at once was unexpectedly fun.

That accident led to the Double Cherry, a power-up that created another copy of the character each time the player picked one up. All copies repeated the same actions but occupied different parts of the level. While one Mario jumped over a gap, another might run into a wall, and a third might step on a separate switch. The controls remained familiar, but now the player had to keep track of several characters’ positions at the same time.

The idea appeared fairly late, when part of the game was already complete, so the developers had to readjust the camera, rebuild some areas, and add switches that required several Marios at once. But controlling multiple Marios simultaneously created more than playful chaos: it also made entirely new kinds of puzzles possible.

Captain Toad Got His Own Levels Without Jumping

Although 3D World was designed for groups, Nintendo also made sure it worked for people playing alone. Almost every stage could be completed from start to finish with a single character, while Green Stars gave solo players an extra reason to leave the main route. Some paths opened only after a certain number of stars had been collected, but there was no need to find every single one. Players could choose which stars to pursue: some required a difficult jump, others were hidden in secret passages, and still others were rewards for short challenges.

The Captain Toad stages were the clearest break from the usual rules. Because of his heavy backpack, the small explorer could not jump, so the player had to rotate the camera around a compact 3D area, inspect it from every side, and plot a route to all five Green Stars. Without the usual jumping, each stage became a puzzle based on observation and spatial reasoning.

The Captain Toad stages provided a break between faster levels and also taught players to use the camera without demanding difficult jumps at the same time. The idea proved successful enough that Nintendo expanded it into the standalone game Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker the following year.

The GamePad’s features were used in ways that would not interfere with multiplayer. Its screen could be used to move certain platforms and reveal hidden objects, while the gyroscope helped adjust the camera angle. The other players, however, used controllers without screens and had no access to those features. For that reason, such interactions remained optional and did not determine how the rest of the game worked.

Why It Wasn’t Galaxy 3

All of this makes it clear why the developers chose 3D Land, rather than Galaxy, as the foundation for the new game. Galaxy’s spacious levels and a camera that followed a single character were poorly suited to four people playing together in front of one television. In 3D Land, by contrast, the camera showed everyone the same route and kept all four players in a shared frame.

The decision was made early in development, when Miyamoto directly asked Koizumi whether the new game would be closer to Galaxy or to 3D Land. Koizumi later recalled that the developers chose 3D Land without hesitation, because while making it they had already been thinking about a similar multiplayer game for a home console.

Although 3D World was not a direct continuation of Galaxy, it inherited a great deal from earlier games. Two familiar faces from Galaxy returned: Rosalina, now equipped with a Spin Attack, and Captain Toad, who received his own puzzle stages. Koizumi described 3D World as the culmination of the evolution of 3D Mario, while Miyamoto emphasized that the new game did not rule out future Galaxy entries.

The title also stressed its connection to 3D Land. In the series, Land had traditionally been associated with handheld systems, while World was associated with home consoles. Even so, the “3D” label initially worried some staff members because it could be mistaken for a promise of stereoscopic graphics, something Wii U did not offer. The developers kept it anyway, since it immediately showed the relationship between the two projects.

The first trailer still gave a misleading impression. Simple grassy platforms and familiar flagpoles looked far less ambitious than Galaxy’s cosmic worlds. The finished game was much more varied: the characters rode trains, entered Bowser’s circus, and tackled stages built around shifting perspectives, while even harder worlds opened after the ending. Almost every stage centered on its own idea, and many of those ideas were never repeated anywhere else in the game.

When Super Mario 3D World launched in November 2013—in Japan (November 21), North America (November 22), and Europe (November 29)—the cautious response to its first reveal gave way to enthusiastic reviews. The Wii U version received a Metacritic average of 93 out of 100 based on 83 reviews.

A Great Game on a Platform That Was Too Small

Even excellent reviews could not quickly reverse Wii U’s fortunes. By December 31, 2013, Nintendo had sold 1.94 million copies of Super Mario 3D World, and by March 31, 2014, that figure had risen to 2.17 million. For a game released only at the end of November, that was a strong result, but the console itself sold just 2.72 million units over the entire fiscal year.

The gap between Nintendo’s expectations and actual sales is clear from the company’s own forecast. At the beginning of the fiscal year, Nintendo expected to sell nine million Wii U systems. In January 2014 it cut that figure to 2.8 million, and the final result came in slightly below even the revised target. Nintendo never said how many people bought the console specifically for 3D World.

Super Mario 3D World ultimately sold 5.89 million copies on Wii U, while total console sales reached 13.56 million units—roughly 43 copies of the game for every hundred systems. That high share shows that 3D World was popular with Wii U owners; the problem was simply that there were too few Wii U owners in the first place.

3D World was not the reason Wii U failed, but it could no longer fix the situation by itself. The game arrived almost a year after the console’s launch, by which point buyers had already lost interest because of the shortage of major releases. For Wii U owners, the new Mario became one of the most important holiday games of the year, but it would only reach a mass audience later on Nintendo Switch.

A Second Chance on Nintendo Switch

For several years after Wii U production ended, Super Mario 3D World remained confined to a console with a relatively small audience. That changed on February 12, 2021, when Nintendo released Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury for Switch. The new version did more than move the game to another system: character movement in the main campaign was sped up, and online cooperative play was added.

The main addition was Bowser’s Fury, a separate adventure in which Mario traveled through a large open world with Bowser Jr. Whenever the gigantic Fury Bowser appeared, a storm swept in and fireballs and beams rained down across the islands. At first the player had to hide and wait out the attack, but later Mario could transform into a giant cat and fight back.

By March 31, 2024, the rerelease had sold 13.47 million copies. The figure cannot be compared directly with sales of the original Wii U release because buyers also received Bowser’s Fury, while the Switch audience was many times larger. Even so, the rerelease’s success showed that 3D World could reach a much wider audience on a more popular console.

In the summer of 2013, the new Mario was expected to save Wii U. That made the announcement of a game that seemed too modest for the task all the more puzzling. But 3D World was never meant to replace Galaxy: the developers finally realized an idea they had been pursuing since Super Mario 64 and created a full-fledged 3D Mario game for several players. It did not save Wii U, but more than seven years later the success of the Switch rerelease showed that the problem had never been the game itself.