Ten Years Ago, This Game Saved Nintendo’s Reputation

One of the benefits to consistency is how much easier it makes innovation. A perfect formula or flawless design can become timeless. Look at the Rubik’s cube or Final Fantasy Tactics and you’ll see something that stays a classic simply because it stays true to itself. But the biggest surprises are the ones you never see coming, and ten years ago Nintendo gave us one of the biggest surprises of all. It gave us Mario.

Yes, we’d all played as Mario before, but on September 10, 2015, Nintendo handed us the keys to the proverbial Mushroom Kingdom. Super Mario Maker wasn’t just another Mario platformer. It was a game design toolkit that unlocked the Super Mario franchise in a way that had never been seen before. It was Nintendo saying, “Fine. Show us what you’ve got.” And we did.

By 2015, the Wii U was an established flop. After the breakout success of the Wii and the high-profile arms race between Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo was starting to feel irrelevant. Super Mario Maker changed the conversation. Even though the console wasn’t meeting commercial expectations, it proved that Nintendo still had the capacity to marry their latest tech with new innovations in game design. And it was willing to stake its flagship intellectual property to those new ideas.

Historically, Mario had been tightly guarded by Nintendo’s legal team and now, seemingly overnight, Nintendo handed over a modder’s dream. The sales reflected the enthusiasm. Commercially, it wasn’t Mario Kart numbers, but four million copies on Wii U puts it comfortably in the top 10 games for the system.

Nintendo’s genius was keeping the editor as drag-and-drop as possible. You’d swipe the Wii U GamePad to plop down Goombas, pipes, platforms, or Bowser himself. You could flip between Super Mario Bros., Mario 3, World, and New Super Mario Bros. U styles, each with their own quirks. It was like having four decades of Mario history sitting neatly in your toolbox.

At first glance, it was kid-friendly and approachable. But it didn’t take long for players to discover they’d end up knee-deep in level design philosophy. How many coins should lure a player down a pipe? How long is too long for a jump? Are impossible levels fun to play?

Players quickly realized the limits were more like suggestions. “You can only fit so many enemies on screen?” Great, cram 100 Bowsers into one corridor and watch the chaos unfold. “The stage can’t be infinite?” Fine, make it an auto-run Rube Goldberg contraption where Mario bounces through springs and flames and death-defying free falls. Super Mario Maker felt messy, chaotic, and brilliant all at once.

Super Mario Maker wasn’t the first game to offer player-created content, but it legitimized it in a way no other franchise could have done. Games like Dreams, Roblox, and Fortnite Creative are indebted to it. Nintendo made it OK for the industry at large to let fans create things. And, ultimately, fans want to show off those creations to as many people as possible. Nintendo found a winning formula in a game that wasn’t just fun to play, it was fun to watch.

Super Mario Maker turned fans into designers, transformed Twitch and YouTube streams into must-see TV, and made the Wii U feel, briefly, like the future. Sure, the sequel on Switch refined things and added more bells and whistles, but the original took the leap. It was Nintendo breaking its own rules, letting the community run wild, and somehow trusting that Mario could survive whatever nonsense we threw at him. It also served as reminder that, despite the wobbly run of the Wii U, Nintendo was still Nintendo. It was still capable of big ideas that broke outside the box.

And it was also capable of knowing a good franchise opportunity when it saw one. Super Mario Maker 2 was a no-brainer for the Switch, refining the experience and introducing a much larger audience to the joys of level design. It more than doubled its predecessor in sales and once again spawned wave after wave of viral content. Super Mario Maker did a lot more than let fans make their own levels, it made Nintendo relevant when it needed it most.