Super Mario Galaxy

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Mario Galaxy is a Nintendo platform game in which Mario runs around tiny worlds shaped like ice cream and apples. It appeared on the Wii, and the people building it were not all sure the idea would work. Some feared the technology could not support it. Others thought a jumping game had no business on a sphere. This documentary asks how that doubt turned into a game that critics ranked among the finest ever made. It asks what the team changed to make Mario welcoming to players of every age. And it asks what went wrong with the first attempt at the music.

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• 2. Walking Upside Down

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  The player begins Super Mario Galaxy with access to exactly one galaxy, out of 42 in the whole game. Each galaxy is a cluster of tiny planets, asteroids and orbiting structures. Every one of those objects has its own gravitational pull. That pull lets Mario circle a planetoid completely, walking sideways or upside down, and then jump toward another object nearby. A handful of areas squeeze the action onto a flat two-dimensional plane.

  The goal everywhere is the Power Star. Stars are earned by finishing a mission, beating a boss or reaching a particular spot. Each new star opens more galaxies and more stars. Most galaxies are reached from a spaceship called the Comet Observatory, which has six domes. Every dome except one holds five galaxies. Five of the domes end in a fight against Bowser or Bowser Jr. Winning earns a special Grand Star, and the Grand Star opens the next dome.

  Collecting 120 Power Stars as Mario lets the player start again as Luigi, for a harder experience. Gather 120 with both brothers and one more challenge appears. Finishing it awards a 121st star and a commemorative picture that can be sent to the Wii Message Board.

  Mario is steered with the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk. Many of his moves come straight from Super Mario 64, including the long jump, wall jumps and several somersaults. The new tool is the Star Pointer, a small blue cursor that appears wherever the Wii Remote points on the screen. With it the player grabs Star Bits, which are shaped like konpeito. Star Bits can be shot to stun enemies, move obstacles or feed Hungry Lumas. The cursor also latches onto small blue Pull Stars that drag Mario across space. In levels where he floats inside a bubble, the pointer blows wind to steer it. Smaller quests use other motion features, such as surfing on a manta ray or balancing on a big ball and rolling it through an obstacle course.

  The Lumas that beg for Star Bits are star-shaped living creatures, and one of them sets the whole story in motion.

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• 3. Star Festival Night

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  The centennial Star Festival is held to watch a comet pass the Mushroom Kingdom. On festival night, Princess Peach finds a Luma and invites Mario to meet it. As he walks toward the castle, Bowser attacks with a fleet of airships and a huge flying saucer. The saucer lifts Peach's castle into outer space. Kamek, one of Bowser's minions, knocks Mario loose into the void, and the Luma follows him.

  Mario wakes on a small planet and meets Rosalina, a guardian of the cosmos who looks after the Lumas. She lives aboard a starship, the Comet Observatory. During a centennial visit to her home world, she explains, Bowser attacked the Observatory and stole the Power Stars that power it. The ship was left unable to move. The Luma that Peach found gives Mario the power to travel through space. He sets out to win the stars back, meeting Luigi and the Toads and clashing with Bowser and Bowser Jr. along the way.

  With enough stars collected, the Observatory flies to the center of the universe, where Bowser holds Peach captive. There Mario learns that Bowser plans to rule the whole universe with Peach at his side. Mario defeats him and frees her. Then one of the galaxy's planets collapses on itself and becomes a supermassive black hole that starts consuming everything. The Lumas sacrifice themselves by jumping in, and the hole collapses into a singularity. The singularity explodes as a supernova, and the universe is made anew.

  Rosalina then tells Mario that dying stars are later reborn as new stars, so the cycle of life continues. Mario wakes in the recreated Mushroom Kingdom beside Peach and Bowser and celebrates the new galaxy in the sky. A player who has gathered 120 stars sees Rosalina thank them before she and the reborn Lumas sail off again aboard the Comet Observatory.

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• 4. From Super Mario 128

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  Late in 1996, shortly after Super Mario 64 appeared, some Nintendo staff noticed an uncomfortable side effect of its success. The game had shaped how 3D games are built. Yet it also opened a gap between players that had not existed in the 2D era, because some people found 3D games too hard. Assistant director Yoshiaki Koizumi traced that difficulty to depth misperception, getting lost and motion sickness. The fixes, above all the camera controls, were cumbersome or intimidating. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto therefore gathered a team inside Nintendo EAD to build a successor, tentatively called Super Mario 128.

  That project surfaced at Nintendo Space World in 2000 as a tech demo showing off the power of the GameCube. Koizumi directed the demo. He wanted its spherical platforms in a real game but held back, believing they were technically impossible. After Super Mario Sunshine came out in late 2002, Miyamoto said it had nothing to do with Super Mario 128 and was simply a continuation of Super Mario 64. Koizumi later regretted that players could pick among several camera modes, because choosing an angle before playing became a burden.

  In mid-2003, the newly formed Nintendo EAD Tokyo had not yet started work on Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. A staff member wanted to combine the team's skills on the next Super Mario game. Koizumi agreed after working with them on Jungle Beat. When that game was finished in late 2004, Miyamoto suggested a large-scale Mario game and pushed for the spherical platform idea to be realised.

  In 2005, Koizumi wrote documents for a Wii game then titled Super Mario Revolution. The Wii itself was still under development. Mario would run around spherical worlds with their own centers of gravity, so he could never fall off an edge. Walking forward in one direction would bring him back to where he started, which made getting lost far less likely. After executives approved the project, Koizumi spent three months building a small prototype with a few EAD Tokyo employees. Miyamoto was always the first to play every build, and he offered suggestions from his office in Kyoto. According to Koizumi, many of the ideas existed before work on the Wii console itself had begun.

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• 5. Spin, Suits and Skeptics

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  Making characters jump on enemies in a 3D world was, in Koizumi's word, "absurd". On a spherical map it would be hard for some players. So the team looked for a different attack. Takeo Shimizu, the producer and programmer, reasoned that the most basic action in a 3D game is simply running. The easiest attack, he concluded, was a spin rather than a jump.

  The spin changed form as the hardware changed. It was first planned as a swivel of the analogue stick on the GameCube controller. Then it moved to rotating the Nunchuk stick. Once motion sensing in the Wii Remote was confirmed, it became a shake of the Remote. At first Mario could spin without pause. Miyamoto had the team add a delay after each spin to make the game harder. The spin stuns enemies and shatters objects. It also triggers Sling Stars, sometimes called Launch Stars, which hurl Mario across huge distances. Elsewhere it climbs vines, skates on ice, flips switches, unscrews bolts and activates several power-ups.

  Few people on the team were confident about spheres. Koichi Hayashida, a co-designer, thought a spherical field would be "a bad match" for a jumping game. Shimizu worried it was technically impossible and "felt a sense of danger" when the plan was approved. Then he began debugging. The game felt "totally fresh" to him, and he thought he was "playing a game like nothing that's come before it". Level designer Futoshi Shirai had liked the idea from the start. Artist Kenta Motokura said players would keep enjoying the adventure by travelling to new planets. The outer space setting let the team try ideas that other Mario games would have struggled to hold.

  According to Hayashida, the idea of transformations came from Koizumi. When Koizumi asked a female staff member what she wanted Mario to turn into, she wrote a note reading "I want a Bee Mario". Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo president, later said the Bee Suit was popular with women. He added that the other suits were designed to add variety to play.

  Seven power-ups grant temporary abilities. The Bee Mushroom lets Mario hover, climb honeycombs and walk on clouds and flowers. The Boo Mushroom lets him float, turn transparent and pass through certain obstacles. The Spring Mushroom launches him to otherwise unreachable heights. The Fire Flower throws fireballs. The Ice Flower grants immunity to flames and lets him lay hexagonal ice tiles over any liquid. The Rainbow Star gives invincibility and extra speed. The Red Star allows brief flight by shaking the Wii Remote, and it draws in nearby coins and Star Bits.

  By the end, Miyamoto saw the game as a true successor to Super Mario 64, one that surpassed the indefinitely halted Super Mario 128 project.

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• 6. Ages Five to Ninety-Five

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  The team wanted a game that anyone from age 5 to 95 could enjoy, so early builds eased players in gently. Miyamoto played them and judged them too easy. He argued that a game loses its excitement once it stops being challenging. Koizumi proposed adjusting the "intensity factor". Mario would survive only three hits, compared with eight in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. To balance that, the designers placed more 1-Up Mushrooms and checkpoints. Looking back, Iwata called the change "representative of the things that players do not notice that actually change the gameplay dramatically".

  The finished health system has three pieces, and a Life Mushroom can stretch it to six. Coins restore health. Underwater, Mario also has an air meter that drains his health if it runs out. Quicksand, dark matter, crushing hazards and black holes kill instantly. Extra lives come from 1-Up Mushrooms, from 50 coins collected without losing a life, or from 50 Star Bits.

  Iwata had noticed a growing number of players giving up partway through games. He wanted a sense of achievement after a difficult task. The team answered with Co-Star mode. One player controls Mario, while the other uses only a Wii Remote to steer a second Star Pointer, gather Star Bits and shoot enemies. The second player can also make Mario jump, and the jump gets higher if both players press the A button together. Holding A while aiming at an enemy keeps some enemies from moving.

  At E3 2006, Miyamoto said the game would arrive within six months of the Wii's launch. EAD Tokyo felt it mattered more to be truly happy with the result, and the game came out eleven months after the console. Koizumi made sure some areas could be enjoyed by all kinds of people, including children. The team also concluded that the heart of a Super Mario game is how fun it feels to play, rather than simply finishing it.

  Shimizu wanted everybody to "gather around the TV", because a Mario game was not necessarily meant to be played alone. For that reason the game supports six save files. A player could look at another person's progress and compare it with their own. Iwata recalled that when the first Super Mario game came out, many more people crowded around the television to watch. He believed well-made games are more enjoyable to watch, and he hoped Co-Star mode would tempt someone who does not usually play to join in.

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• 7. The Rejected Soundtrack

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  Mahito Yokota, who led the musical direction, first wrote 28 tracks in a Latin American style. Earlier Mario games had already used Latin American percussion such as steelpans, bongo drums and congas. For the game's main theme, Yokota combined Latin American instruments with a synthesiser to echo the sound of old science fiction films. Koizumi approved it. But when Yokota played it for sound supervisor Koji Kondo, Kondo said it was "no good".

  Yokota asked why. Kondo answered: "if somewhere in your mind you have an image that Mario is cute, please get rid of it". Yokota almost resigned in anger. Kondo implied that Mario was "cool" and told him to try again. Yokota had assumed that Mario was meant for children, so he had written "cute" music for that audience. Koizumi later told him, "It wasn't so bad".

  Three months later, Yokota brought Miyamoto three pieces in different styles. One was orchestral, one was pop, and one mixed the two. Miyamoto chose the orchestral piece because it sounded the most "space-like". Yokota says Miyamoto did not know that Kondo had actually written it. Iwata later explained that Miyamoto wanted a sound that expressed this particular game, in contrast to the tropical sounds of Super Mario Bros. Yokota admitted he struggled at first to write music that sounded like Mario. As time passed, he said, his songs had "become natural".

  To give the soundtrack variety, Yokota and Kondo wrote separately. Kondo composed five pieces that Yokota specifically requested, and Yokota wrote the rest. Together they avoided a soundtrack that would "end up all sounding the same". The result features 28 orchestral songs played by a 50-person symphony orchestra, the first time the series had used one.

  Yokota worried at first that orchestral music might clash with the rhythm of a Mario game, but he felt it made the scale seem "more epic". Kondo feared players would feel "obligated to play the game in time to the music". Sound director Masafumi Kawamura solved the timing problem with a technique he had used on The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. The game syncs MIDI data with streaming data. To make that possible, the orchestra performed at different tempos set with a metronome.

  The game originally used the Wii Remote speaker for all sorts of sound effects. Kawamura decided that was redundant alongside the television. He limited the Remote to sounds triggered by Mario's own actions, such as hitting an enemy, because it kept players more immersed.

  The official soundtrack was released on the 24th of January 2008, first as an exclusive for Club Nintendo subscribers in Japan. European members got it in November 2008. The Original Soundtrack held the 28 game tracks. The Platinum Edition added a second disc with 53 more, for 81 in total. In 2011, North America received the Original Soundtrack inside a black Wii Family Edition console bundle with New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

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• 8. Acclaim and Aftermath

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  On the 1st of November 2007, Super Mario Galaxy reached players in Japan, and other major territories followed later that month. Critics were nearly unanimous. On Metacritic it holds 97 out of 100 from 73 reviews, the fourth-highest rating of any game. Until GameRankings shut down in December 2019, that site listed it first among games with at least 20 reviews, at 97.64% across 78 reviews.

  Visuals drew the loudest praise. Alex Navarro of GameSpot wrote that "there simply isn't a better-looking Wii game available". Margaret Robertson of Eurogamer called the visuals an "explosion of inventiveness". Matt Casamassina of IGN said the game combined "great art" with "great tech". Critics were just as taken with the gameplay. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com said the shifting gravity "makes even the wildest challenge feel almost second nature". A reviewer at Edge found the Wii Remote controls subtler than the "vigorous literalism" of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. A Famitsu reviewer called the tempo "abnormally good".

  The music won praise too. Chris Scullion of the Official Nintendo Magazine believed it was the best in any Super Mario game. Parish called it "quintessentially Mario" yet uncharacteristically sophisticated. Complaints were few. Bryn Williams of GameSpy thought the two-player mode was "shallow". Chris Hudak of GameRevolution disliked the lack of voice acting, though he admitted that voices would "probably seem lame and wrong".

  Sales matched the reviews. The game sold 350,000 units in Japan within a few weeks. In the United States it sold 500,000 in its first week, the best first week for a Mario game there at the time. The NPD Group reported 1.4 million US sales in December 2007, making it the month's top seller. It finished 2007 as the fifth best-selling game in the country, with 2.52 million copies. After 13 months it had sold 7.66 million worldwide. By the end of March 2020 the total reached 12.80 million, making it the third best-selling non-bundled Wii game.

  Awards followed. IGN, GameSpot, Nintendo Power, Kotaku and Yahoo! Games all named it their Game of the Year for 2007. In February 2008, it won "Adventure Game of the Year" at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and it earned five more nominations there. In 2009, it won the Game of the Year BAFTA at the 5th British Academy Games Awards, beating Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It was the first Nintendo game to win that award. Eurogamer and IGN named it "Game of the Generation". In their final issue, the Official Nintendo Magazine ranked it the greatest Nintendo game of all time.

  A sequel came next. In the 1,000th issue of Famitsu, Miyamoto said he was interested in making one. During development it was called "Super Mario Galaxy More" and was first meant to reuse variations of planets from the original. New ideas piled up until it became a full sequel. Super Mario Galaxy 2 was announced at E3 2009 in Los Angeles. It went on sale on the 23rd of May 2010 in North America, the 27th of May in Japan and the 11th of June in Europe. It earned similar praise and had sold 6.36 million copies by April 2011.

  The original has returned several times. On the 22nd of March 2018, it reached China on the Nvidia Shield TV through a partnership between Nintendo, Nvidia and iQiyi. It runs through an emulator at 1080p, with the pointer remapped to the right analogue stick because the Shield lacks motion controls. On the 18th of September 2020 it joined Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection for Nintendo Switch. For the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., an enhanced version arrived on the 2nd of October 2025, paired with its sequel or sold separately on the eShop. It adds an assist mode and a new chapter of Rosalina's storybook, and a free update takes it to 4K resolution on Nintendo Switch 2. A pair of Amiibo followed on the 2nd of April 2026.

  On the 12th of September 2025, a Nintendo Direct presentation revealed that the follow-up to 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie would be called The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It was released on the 1st of April 2026.

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