Super Mario Galaxy - Development

Development

The concept for Super Mario Galaxy's gameplay originated from ideas taken from Super Mario 128, a tech demo shown at Nintendo Space World in 2000 to exemplify the processing power of the Nintendo GameCube. The demo's director (and director of Super Mario Galaxy), Yoshiaki Koizumi, desired that one of the demo's distinguishing features, spherical-based platforms, would be used in a future game, but was held back in belief that such a feat would be "impossible for technical reasons". Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto suggested to work on the next large-scale Mario game after Nintendo EAD Tokyo finished development on Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in late 2004, pushing for the spherical platform concept to be realized. A prototype of the game's physics system took three months to build, where it was decided that the game's use of spherical platforms would best be suited to planetoids in an outer space environment, with the concept of gravity as a major feature. During development, the designers would often exchange ideas with Miyamoto from his office in Kyoto, where he would make suggestions to the game design. Miyamoto ended up being more involved in the development of Galaxy than he was with Super Mario 64. The game's script was written by Takayuki Ikkaku, though Koizumi was heavily involved in the creation of the story.

The idea for Mario to have a "spin" attack came during the early stages of development, when it was decided that jumping on enemies on a spherical map would be difficult for some players. Initially the "spin" was activated via rotation of the Nunchuk's control stick, but after motion sensing was confirmed to be implemented in the Wii Remote, the "spin" was changed to be activated through shaking the controller. Koizumi suggested that Mario's life meter should have a maximum capacity of three instead of eight (which Mario had in the previous two games), but at the same time more 1-Up Mushrooms would be placed in the game and checkpoints would be added, in order to balance the game's difficulty. Satoru Iwata noted "the fact that the intensity factor changes according to whether the life meter is set to 3 or 8 is representative of the things that players do not notice that actually change the gameplay dramatically."

It was first hinted by Takashi Tezuka, Nintendo's analysis and development's general manager, that multiplayer was going to be co-op in an interview with gaming site IGN. Two-player functionality was later confirmed, along with reports of the team experimenting with new ways to use the Wii Remote so that one player can control Mario while the other aids him, backed up by suggestions by Miyamoto that the second player could have the ability to affect Mario's progress. It was later revealed at Nintendo's E3 2007 that the co-op mode was permanently implemented into the game and could be accessed at any time.

In an after-hours press event at E3 2006 in May, Miyamoto stated: "I don't want to promise anything yet. But if it's not a launch title it will definitely be there within the first six months". Nintendo of America's President Reggie Fils-Aime later stated in a November 27, 2006 interview with cable TV network MTV that the game was expected to be released sometime up to Christmas 2007. Near the end of Miyamoto's keynote presentation at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in March, he further confirmed: "You'll be able to play Super Mario Galaxy this year". At Nintendo's E3 2007 conference, it was confirmed that Super Mario Galaxy would be released in North America on November 12, 2007 and four days later in Europe. In North America, certain retailers had given out a free limited edition coin for preordering the game. Some retailers had delayed it until November 13, 2007, such as GameStop in North America, and some retailers had delayed the release until November 14, 2007. Equally, certain UK retailers shipped the game a day earlier than the European release date, for example Virgin megastores and Game.