Five Lesser-Known Facts About Wario
Did You Know Gaming has a new video out — all about the history of Wario. If you don’t have seven minutes to spare, here are the five most interesting facts about the flatulent anti-plumber:
The thought pattern that led to Wario started when Nintendo’s R&D1 development team was assigned the second Mario platformer for Game Boy. They felt more comfortable working with characters they invented themselves, which kind of explains why Super Mario Land 1 was so offbeat, and why exactly Mario would have his own castle and live in “Mario Land” in the second game. The Game Boy titles almost live in their own reality, but the one exception that escaped that world was Wario, who was popular upon introduction.
The thought pattern that led to WarioWare began with the ill-fated 64DD add-on for the Nintendo 64. R&D1 was working on Polygon Maker, a creative tool for the device that let people make their own primitive 3D models. They included a series of minigames, and found the development of those games to be more interesting than the title as a whole. Since no one bought the 64DD, they reused the minigame ideas within the first Warioware game.
One WarioWare game nearly came with peripherals WarioWare games have generally been built around whatever new gimmick Nintendo was obsessed with at the time — touch controls, tilt controls, camera input. WarioWare Snapped was the camera-focused game, but developer Intelligent Systems had so much trouble getting all kinds of bodies to be recognized by the program, they considered releasing the game with a black mat and bright sleeve for the player’s index finger. Fortunately they improved the programming instead.
Wario’s hidden moment of humility In 2004’s WarioWorld for the Gamecube, Wario sings an obnoxious song whenever the player pauses the game. If this song is left on for an unbearable 50 minutes, Wario will actually apologize for it: “Sorry.”
A Wario game was entirely hand-animated I wish developers would use this technique more often, but it’s so labor-intensive I understand why it’s rare. 2008’s Wario Land: Shake It was a 2-D platformer for the Wii that was entirely animated by hand — each frame of movement was a separate drawing, no cheating involved. Wario alone took around 2,000 drawings to animate completely. Maybe this is why we haven’t seen much of Wario since this game — the effort tired the dev team out.
More facts can be absorbed through Did You Know Gaming’s video below.