Development
The game was produced by Gunpei Yokoi, who previously produced Donkey Kong (1981), Donkey Kong Jr. (1982), Mario Bros. (1983) and Metroid (1986). It featured music written by Hirokazu Tanaka, who also composed for Duck Hunt (1984). Hiroshi Yamauchi, then president of Nintendo, wanted a Mario game to be on the Game Boy, and ordered Yokoi to create the game with his development team, Nintendo Research & Development 1. This would be the first original portable Mario game since the others made for the Game and Watch. This would also be the first Mario game developed without Shigeru Miyamoto, Yokoi's protege and creator of Mario and The Legend of Zelda. Early in conceptual development, they decided to recreate the classic gameplay of the 1985 original in new worlds that took Mario far from the Mushroom Kingdom. It seemed like the perfect title to help sell their new system. Yokoi's take on Mario helped the Game Boy surpass the NES as Nintendo's best selling platform, and the game itself just surpassed Super Mario Bros. 3's sales figures.
Initially, Nintendo planned to package Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, but decided to package Tetris instead at the insistence of Henk Rogers, who convinced Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa that a Mario title would only sell the Game Boy to young boys instead of everyone. This was the first game that released for the original Game Boy.
Read more about this topic: Super Mario Land
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The highest form of development is to govern one’s self.”
—Zerelda G. Wallace (1817–1901)