Did You Know Gaming has a new video out covering obscure facts from the Super Mario Galaxy series. They really did their homework this time, because there’s a ton of behind-the-scenes information in this video, most of which isn’t common knowledge. Here are the most interesting five:
The original Galaxy was inspired by 128 Marios It’s known by a lot of Nintendo fans that the tech demo 128 Marios, which showed off the Gamecube’s computing power back in 2001 by displaying many different Mario models running around at once, never turned into an actual game but inspired the mechanics in Pikmin. You might not also know it inspired Super Mario Galaxy too. A programmer realized after watching the demo that the problem of “getting lost” in a 3-D Mario level could be solved by making the level round. Another demo, this one unreleased, was made to try out the proposal, and it became the foundation for Super Mario Galaxy.
The orchestral soundtrack was a last-minute addition Originally Nintendo did not feel an orchestra was needed for Super Mario Galaxy’s soundtrack. It was only at the composer’s insistence that it was tried, with a twist: the orchestra watched game footage and the music was conducted based around the beat of whatever Mario was doing. Chopped up and layered, this provided a natural-sounding soundtrack that changed in real time depending on the situation, something that is normally only attempted with MIDI soundtracks.
They could have put Yoshi in the original Galaxy, but felt it had “too much already” Yoshi was saved for Super Mario Galaxy 2 because it was felt introducing all these new gameplay ideas AND Yoshi on top of them would be too overwhelming. The idea of the Mario-head spaceship was also thought up during the original Galaxy’s development and not used for the same reason. Good thing they decided to make a second one.
The second game started as an expansion to the first Super Mario Galaxy 2 started as a proposed series of additional levels that players could add to the first game via the Wii Shop. However, the dev team came up with so many new ideas for levels and planets, it was decided to make an entirely separate game for them.
Majora’s Mask inspired one of the transformations in Galaxy 2 One of the directors for Galaxy 2 previously worked on Majora’s Mask, and put Rock Mario into the game as a nod to Goron Link. They can roll around and destroy objects in similar ways.
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