Super Mario World

• 1. Launch Day in Japan

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  On the 21st of November 1990, Super Mario World reached Japanese players under the longer title Super Mario World: Super Mario Bros. 4. It was one of only two launch games for Nintendo's new Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan. The other was F-Zero. Every earlier Mario adventure had been built for the older Nintendo Entertainment System, so this one had to prove that a new machine deserved new games. Why did a dinosaur companion wait years to join Mario? What did a team do with a console whose software tools were still unfinished? And how did a platform game become the best-selling title on its system?

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• 2. Dinosaur Land

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  The instruction booklet, not the game itself, is where the story of Super Mario World is told. After bringing peace to the Mushroom World in Super Mario Bros. 3, the brothers Mario and Luigi take a vacation with Princess Toadstool. Their destination is Dinosaur Land, a prehistoric-themed world swarming with dinosaurs and other enemies.

  While the princess rests on a beach, Bowser captures her. The brothers search for hours. Eventually they find a giant white egg with green spots in a forest. It hatches, and out comes a young dinosaur named Yoshi.

  Yoshi explains that his dinosaur friends have also been trapped in eggs. The culprits are Bowser's children, the Koopalings. Mario and Luigi realise that Bowser's forces must have taken the princess as well. Yoshi gives Mario a cape, and the three set out across Dinosaur Land.

  Bowser hears that the brothers are coming and sends the Koopalings to stop them. The brothers defeat the children and free Yoshi's friends. At Bowser's Castle they fight Bowser himself, send him flying into the sky, and rescue the princess. Peace returns to Dinosaur Land.

  The world behind that tidy booklet story was built with software tools that were still under development.

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• 3. A Team and a Console

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  Work on a fourth Super Mario game began in October 1988, shortly after Super Mario Bros. 3 was released. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development handled it with a team of fifteen people. Three were main programmers and one was a character designer. Most had worked on earlier Mario games. Takashi Tezuka directed. Shigeru Miyamoto, who created both Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, produced. Shigefumi Hino served as graphics designer. In a later interview, the core team said Miyamoto held the most authority.

  Behind the project sat a business worry. In an interview with TOUCH Magazine, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi observed that Famicom sales had been slowly falling since a peak about two years earlier. If Nintendo kept supporting that machine, he said, players would eventually "get bored" and move toward better games. He called that "a dangerous situation".

  Tezuka admitted that the new console's tools were not fully developed, so the team had to "go along with starting something new". Miyamoto noted that limits on scrolling and on the number of colours no longer applied. As an experiment, the team ported Super Mario Bros. 3 to the new hardware. Despite improved colours and sprites, it felt like the same game. That convinced Miyamoto that the goal should be something "totally new". About a month after work began, the team started testing ideas the third game's hardware had made impossible.

  Super Mario World was unveiled at the first Shoshinkai event on the 28th of July 1989. Observers found the technology impressive but thought the gameplay and graphics too close to earlier Mario games. Nintendo pushed the release to late 1990. The team was still struggling with the console and its tools, and it wanted controls that were friendlier to players. A global chip shortage also slowed the Super Famicom's production schedule. At the second Shoshinkai, on the 28th and the 29th of August 1990, the public responded well to the gameplay.

  The game arrived in the middle of the console wars. Sega's Mega Drive was two years old, and it outsold Nintendo's console. For the first time since December 1985, Nintendo did not lead the market, though it eventually overtook Sega. Sega's mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, struck many people as a faster and "cooler" alternative to Mario.

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• 4. The Making of Yoshi

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  Miyamoto had wanted Mario to have a dinosaur companion since the original Super Mario Bros. The engineers could not deliver one, because the Nintendo Entertainment System was too limited. The idea reaches back even further. For the 1984 game Devil World, Miyamoto designed a green dragon that shared many similarities with Yoshi.

  During work on Super Mario Bros. 3, Miyamoto kept sketches around his desk. One showed Mario riding a horse. As Super Mario World progressed, the team chose a "dinosaur land" setting. Tezuka asked Hino to draw a reptile-like creature based on Miyamoto's sketches. Hino's first design looked too reptilian to Tezuka, who felt it "didn't really fit into the Mario world". He urged the designer to try a "cuter" character. Tezuka also speculated that Miyamoto's love of horse riding, and of country and western themes, shaped Yoshi's creation.

  In play, Yoshi is a rideable companion who can eat most enemies. If he swallows a Koopa or its shell, he can instead spit it out as a projectile. Wait too long, and he swallows it for good. Holding a shell in his mouth gives him an ability that matches its colour. A blue shell lets him fly. A yellow shell makes him release dust clouds that defeat nearby enemies. A red shell lets him produce three fireballs. A flashing shell grants all three abilities, while a green shell grants none.

  The default Yoshi is green, but blue, yellow, and red versions are hidden in the game. Players find each one as an egg in the Star World areas. Feeding it five enemies, or a Super Mushroom, a Fire Flower, a Cape Feather, or a Starman, makes the baby Yoshi mature.

  Those Star World areas belong to a larger set of secrets the game hides behind keys.

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• 5. Capes, Maps and Secrets

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  There are 96 level exits in Super Mario World, yet a player can finish the game much faster by using secret Star Road routes. Two screens carry the experience. One is an overworld map, and the other is a side-scrolling course, some of which scroll automatically. The map shows an overhead view of the current world, with several paths leading from its entrance to a castle. Along the way sit action panels, fortresses, ghost houses, castles, and other icons, so players can choose different routes.

  The game has seven worlds. Each contains fortresses controlled by one of the Koopalings, and the player must defeat them to move on. Bowser waits in his castle in the seventh and final world. Lives are lost by touching an enemy as Small Mario, falling off the screen, getting crushed, touching lava, or running out of time. A completed castle, fortress, or haunted house acts as a save point, and choosing "Continue" resumes from the latest one.

  The new Cape Feather gives Mario a cape. With it he can fly, glide, and use the cape as a sail. The P-Balloon offers another way to float. A new Spin Jump lets the player crush enemies, leap off Yoshi, bounce safely off normally invulnerable foes, or break certain blocks, but only while a power-up is active.

  The game also lets the player "store" a spare power-up in a box at the top centre of the screen. If Mario is hit, the stored item drops automatically, and the player can also release it by hand at any time. A star makes Mario invincible to minor dangers. It does not save him from lava, a fall off the screen, or a timer running out.

  Secret routes depend on keys scattered through the levels. Carry a key to a keyhole, and it unlocks either a new level or a Star Road. These hidden stages can lead onward to others, such as the Special World. Finishing the Special Zone permanently changes some enemy sprites and the colour scheme of the overworld map. Two players can also share the adventure by taking turns on the map, with the first controlling Mario and the second controlling Luigi.

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• 6. Kondo's New Sounds

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  Composer Koji Kondo had written different melodies for Super Mario Bros. 3, and for Super Mario World he chose to reuse those same themes in rearranged form. His reasoning was that players would recognise the melodies while hearing new variations as they progressed. Because this was the first game made for the Super Nintendo, he felt "overjoyed" to compose with eight sounds at once.

  To show off the console's novelty, Kondo used many different instruments and brought them in one after another in the title song. As work went on, he worried about how people would react to his unusual combinations. He had noted that the more traditional square waves and triangle waves had "gained acceptance" with consumers. For sound effects he used a variety of musical instruments rather than square waves, which he said emphasised a traditional technology combined with new materials. Writing all the music took him around a year and a half.

  Critics later singled out the audio. Rob Swan of Computer and Video Games said it used the console's PCM chip to its fullest potential. He and Paul Glancey agreed that the sound effects were "mindblowing". Jeuxvideo.com's Frédéric Goyon praised the soundtrack's originality, and Jason Schreier of Kotaku felt the rhythmic effects reinforced the atmosphere. Skyler Miller enjoyed the upbeat music and the echoing effects heard when Mario goes underground.

  Not every reviewer was as warm. IGN's Lucas Thomas called the soundtrack "another one of Koji Kondo's classics" but remarked in hindsight that it was less memorable than Kondo's earlier work. Nintendo Life's Morgan Sleeper and GameSpot's Alex Navarro both argued the opposite, writing that it was the best music in the Super Mario series. Sleeper called the soundtrack "timeless".

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• 7. The Critical Verdict

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  In December 2019, the review aggregator GameRankings placed Super Mario World 78th among the highest-rated games of all time. Its aggregate score was 94% from nine reviews. Sales matched the praise. The game has sold 20.61 million copies worldwide, which makes it the best-selling game on the Super Nintendo.

  Visuals drew the first comments. Rob Swan of Computer and Video Games called the graphics an excellent example of what the new console could do. Paul Glancey found them stunning and was grateful the game came free with the console. Four reviewers in Electronic Gaming Monthly agreed, though they added that it used little of the console's power compared with other games available for it. Looking back, Lucas Thomas of IGN saw a significant leap over the 8-bit era, but also a graphically upgraded continuation of Super Mario Bros. 3. Morgan Sleeper of Nintendo Life went further and called it the "graphical holy grail" that retro-styled games aspire to.

  Level design earned the loudest applause. The Electronic Gaming Monthly reviewers praised the secrets and the variety, and they appreciated that Nintendo had not recycled assets from Super Mario Bros. 3. Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer said the move away from purely linear platforming was an evolutionary leap for gaming in general. Karn Bianco of Cubed3 called it "one of the smoothest platformers in existence". Alex Navarro of GameSpot wrote that "nothing about the game feels out of place or superfluous". Sleeper called the level design an "unrivalled master class".

  Awards followed. Nintendo Power and Power Play both gave it a 1991 Game of the Year award. In 2009, a poll by Empire voted it "the greatest game of all time". Official Nintendo Magazine ranked it seventh-best Nintendo game that same year, then third in its final issue of October 2014, behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario Galaxy. Retro Gamer named it the best platform game in 2007.

  Back in 1995, the magazine Total! ranked it the 11th-best Super Nintendo game and called it "a contender for the best game ever".

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• 8. Afterlife of a Classic

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  Super Mario World reached North America on the 23rd of August 1991. Nintendo also issued a version for arcade cabinets, so players could try the game before buying it. Packed in with the console, it helped popularise the Super Nintendo and became the best-selling game of its generation. Miyamoto has said it is his favourite Mario game.

  The game kept returning. In December 1994 it appeared in Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World, a pack-in release. Its code was largely unchanged, but Luigi's sprites were redrawn so he looked distinct rather than a palette swap of Mario. Between 2001 and 2002 it came to the Game Boy Advance as Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2. That version let players save anywhere, lowered the difficulty, and added four-player support through the Game Link Cable. GameSpot named it the best video game of February 2002. In the United States it sold 2.5 million copies and earned 74 million dollars by August 2006.

  The original moved on to the Wii Virtual Console, reaching the United States on the 5th of February 2007, then to the Wii U and the New Nintendo 3DS. It was one of 21 games in the Super NES Classic Edition of September 2017. On the 5th of September 2019 it launched on the Nintendo Classics service, with the Advance 2 version following on the 25th of May 2023.

  Yoshi became one of the most important characters in the Mario franchise. He turned up in later Super Mario games and in nearly all Mario sports and spin-off games. He is the main playable character in the 1995 prequel, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. In a 2008 poll in Japan, he was voted the third-favourite video game character, behind Mario and Cloud Strife. Meanwhile, DIC Entertainment produced a thirteen-episode animated series that ran on NBC from September to December 1991. A clone called Super Mario's Wacky Worlds was in development for the Philips CD-i from 1992 to 1993, but it was cancelled after the console failed commercially.

  Fans kept the game alive too. A large ROM hacking scene uses tools such as Lunar Magic to make new levels, graphics, music, and mechanics. Kaizo Mario World, featured in many Let's Play videos, popularised the word Kaizo for hacks of extreme difficulty. Super Mario World is one of four games whose assets appear in Super Mario Maker, released for the Wii U in 2015. Its 2019 sequel added snow and nighttime themes for Super Mario World levels, with new music composed by Kondo. A three-level microgame from the game also appears in WarioWare: Get It Together!

  In December 2025, IGN named Super Mario World the best Mario game.

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