Super Mario Maker Review

For thirty years Nintendo's level design was the company's most closely held craft, and Super Mario Maker gave it away with a stylus and a shake gesture. The toolbox spans four engines, from the 1985 original through New Super Mario Bros. U, and each keeps its own physics, so a jump arc that clears a gap in one style will not clear it in another. That fidelity is why the thing works as a teaching instrument: build something unplayable and the editor will not tell you, but the upload feed will.

Nintendo's one hard rule, that you must finish your own course before you are allowed to publish it, quietly does more for quality control than any rating system could. What came back was a decade of invention the company would never have sanctioned itself, from automatic levels that play themselves in time with the music to Kaizo courses tuned to frame perfect inputs. The Wii U audience was small and the search tools were poor, which caps how far it reached, but as an argument that design is a skill anyone can practise, it still has no equal.