I got seriously irked the first time I sunk any time into Mario Kart 8. It wasn’t anything to do with the gameplay or even being deathstared at by Luigi though, it was more to do with the untapped promise of the greater Mushroom Kingdom as I was hooning through it.

What dawned on me is that we haven’t really had a run as Mario (or anyone else from his world) in sandbox or open-world form since Super Mario 64* -- a game that is still one of my all-time favourites to this day.

The terms “open-world” and “sandbox” were barely known or even understood by marketing teams or even punters back then, but there were a few games setting the benchmark as far as player-driven progression in games was concerned: Mario, Zelda and Grand Theft Auto. Other examples exist, and obviously during the SNES’ reign we had a lot of ‘open-world’ top-down adventures, but the games that really thrust players into spectacular 3D game-worlds can really be counted on one hand.

What’s taken lightly now, and even for granted, is the sheer wonder at your own exploration and discovery of, and within, these new worlds. The first time you descended to Hazy Maze Cave in Super Mario 64 and saw Dorrie floating in the underwater lake before you was, huge. That glorious moment when Link and Epona escaped Lon Lon Ranch by jumping the fence and you realised you were *almost* free to ride wherever you wanted on horseback was, liberating. And getting into a car, by any means necessary, in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, to cruise the open roads listening to 80s new wave was, fucking cool.

What we learnt from these individual triumphs in each game, was the potential a non-handheld environment could have on how players thought about their own actions in an open-world. The idea that you had a series of disparate systems you could use at your leisurely whim, to engage the game in your own way, was as much a revolution as Nintendo’s N64 analogue controller. But I’m getting off-point.



Super Mario 64 wasn’t just amazing because of the above, it was because this side-scrolling world we’d all grown up with was now realised as physical space. It was part of a vertices we could freely move around in and explore in different ways. Goombahs were plump, round little things that could also move freely, changing the way we thought about squishing them. Invincibility stars didn’t just run away from you in a single line, they went maddeningly everywhere, testing your 3D platforming resolve. It was a revelation entering the Mushroom Kingdom for the first time on the N64, and it’s truly sad that this fantastical world hasn’t really been thoroughly explored, from a development perspective further.

Which actually brings me to a crossroads in the purpose of this feature. Initially it was a bit of a personal outcry (or loveletter) at just wanting to run around in the Mushroom Kingdom as any damn character from the universe’s lore because it looks so great in Mario Kart 8 as courses lifted from the Kingdom’s rich history, but it’s raised a point about Nintendo’s lengthy development schedules that are, really, pretty barebones in the face of so much actual potential.

The company’s business model is a shadow of its former self where they spread those first-rate Triple-A releases across a stable of second-party developers and third-party exclusives. Rare, Silicon Knights, Left Field Productions, n-Space, Factor 5 (for the most part) et al, helped spread the load and keep a (reasonably) steady flow of games appearing on the N64 and GameCube, and allowed those WOW games from Nintendo to emerge as part of a release list that kept players playing, despite some delays. In more recent times though, Nintendo has all but abolished relationships like those above, leaving just a handful of studios who aren’t internally based, working on Nintendo exclusives.

It occurred to me then, as it probably has to a lot of others, that with such a rich stable of characters and universes to pull from, and with an equally talented list of developers out in the wide world (many of whom are still in their infancy by way of the more recent indie explosion), Nintendo could up the flow of their Wii U releases, with games people care about, while having to not rely on third-parties to share their own cross-platform releases -- a factor that has definitively come to light for Nintendo’s home console over the past two years. Moreover, considering Miyamoto himself admitted the company was not properly prepared for the challenges jumping to HD development would bring, being able to offload a number of their big names to established current and next-gen studios not only makes sense, it stands as criminal they haven’t done so yet.

Pride is likely one of the biggest factors here. Nintendo is known for wanting to remain a development innovator while being restrictive of how their creations appear at the hands of third-parties, but it’s not an indestructible roadblock. We saw what SEGA and Toshihiro Nagoshi managed to do with the brilliant F-Zero GX for GameCube and, naturally, what Retro Studios pulled off with Metroid Prime was not only a miracle, but a perfect fusion of Nintendo-style development and young, ambitious Western development that brought a heavily established series out of 2D and into a glorious first-person 3D game-world, where its staple platforming components weren’t lost, but bolstered. That this proven system isn’t in place moving forward seems utterly ridiculous.

Imagine if Team Meat was given a chance to work on a traditional Super Mario side-scroller? And that open-world Pokemon RPG people have been wishing for, for years, could be easily co-handled by any number of experienced teams in the field (Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma team would be ideal for this, actually, or even a splinter group from the Monster Hunter series). A new F-Zero from the folks who did the original GC version, again, would be massive, or a new team could come on board such as Black Box or, wait for it, Criterion. Meanwhile, grabbing another indie superstar like Braid creator Jonathan Blow to help realise millions of fanpeoples’ dreams of a new Earthbound wouldn’t just bolster a Nintendo release calendar, it would set the media and industry influencers on fire.

I almost daren’t mention it for fear of the Internet exploding, but speaking with our good friends at Vooks, and with a little Twitter love thrown in, someone did drop this tantalising little idea: From Software’s Dark Souls/Bloodbound team working on a Zelda offshoot.



We’re drooling.

And none of these suggestions is at the expense of Nintendo’s vision and penchant for top-notch day-one content. The company has collaborated in the past with great success, helping developers reach a potential they might not have even realised they have (Silicon Knights heavily comes to mind here), but it’s not just about lauding their past and high-profile, because even the mighty Big N is fallible, as we’ve witnessed for the past few years where their online presence (and understanding) is concerned. Working with any developers who’ve had experience in the networking realm would hopefully teach an old dog a few tricks we’d all like to see, and also just help in thinking longterm about the social nature of games. I’m sure we can all agree that while Ninty’s efforts on the latest 3DS Pokemon were admirable, a Destiny-style lite console MMO featuring the game, and a real human cast of trainers is actually what we want.

So we’re back to that original idea. That concept that Nintendo is sitting on a goldmine of character and gameplay potential, but that it’s being sorely underutilised. Sure, when their games do release it’s a massive event and the world’s colour changes to a bright shade of happy for a short period of time, before going black and dank and we’re left in the Nintendo franchise dark, once again. But there are other artists out there -- many of whom picked up their brushes because of you, Nintendo. If you want to maintain relevance in the industry; remain a staple of games being fun and exploratory; rewarding and fulfilling, and still be at the fore of innovation, I urge you to look to your stable and let a few horses out to stud -- you might be surprised at the offspring they bring.

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*Yes, Super Mario Sunshine had an open-world feel, but lacked in areas like interiors and an expansive or -- it was a series of sandbox levels tied cleverly to a hub, similarly to Super Mario 64, but arguably not to the same scale.