At the time of Super Mario Land's release, its producer, Gunpei Yokoi, was one of gaming's most influential figures. The man who invented the d-pad and mentored Shigeru Miyamoto - indeed, it was Yokoi who first brought Donkey Kong to then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi's attention - headed up an R&D1 team that could seemingly do no wrong. Responsible for the likes of Metroid and Kid Icarus, Nintendo's oldest internal studio was given the task of making a Mario game for Yokoi's latest innovation, a handheld device called the Game Boy.
Yet despite Yokoi's senior status, Super Mario Land feels like an act of rebellion. Study it closely and it increasingly feels tantamount to deliberate sabotage, or at the very least wilful subversion. Mario was not an R&D1 creation. He was Miyamoto's idea, not Yokoi's. And this experienced team did not consider their latest assignment a privilege. Not for nothing did Super Mario Land's sequel feature a villain named after a contraction of the Japanese word for 'evil' - warui - and Mario. Wario was a character born of frustration, a manifestation of his creators' ill feeling toward a character that wasn't theirs.
Yokoi's philosophy of lateral thinking with seasoned technology encouraged developers to embrace fun and novelty ahead of cutting-edge tech: it was a credo that worked wonders for Nintendo's Game and Watch devices and for the Game Boy itself. A by-product of the hardware's limitations was that familiar Mario elements needed a readjustment. Goombas and Koopas returned, albeit in miniscule form, barely recognisable from their NES sprites. 1-Ups defied tradition, too, appearing as hearts rather than mushrooms, although it could be argued that differentiating these tiny fungi from a standard super mushroom would have been difficult given their diminutive size and the Game Boy's four-colour display.
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