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Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - How Super Mario Mastered Level Design

Extra History · 1.2M views · 2014-06-05 · 5:43

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Overview

A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 teaches players to play through level design alone, without text tutorials.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the standard walkthrough of Mario's implicit teaching and as an example of hiding the tutorial inside the problem.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2023

Topics

Game designGame history & retro gaming
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super mario broslevel 1-1tutorialsnintendo

What people said

jader201 · 2021-06 · Recommendation

Was thinking the same thing. The Nintendo designers were always so meticulous about the design of the levels, especially what’s visible to a player at any given point. To get a sense for this, watch this video [1] (from 7 years ago) walking through the design of level 1-1 of SMB. It’s crazy what (likely) went into planning the design of each level of the various Mario platformer games. But like OP, this is strictly looking at it from a gameplay perspective, ignoring the impressive technical feet that this is. [1] [VIDEO]

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iamwil · 2023-05 · Reference

Yes, it's rare, but they have. Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW: - [LINK] And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW: - [LINK] - [LINK] Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games Mario Kart: - [LINK] Super Mario World: - [LINK] Super Mario Bro 3: - [LINK] GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels. - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO] Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling. 1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die. 2. Increase the challenge with the mechanic by adding variations 3. Ramp up challenge even more by combining with previously learned mechanic 4. Have periods of rest inbetween the challenges.

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zeta0134 · 2021-06 · Reference

Possibly the most famous video game tutorial of all time has got to be World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros. [VIDEO] And really, most of the later Mario games execute this fairly well, with some (sunny) exceptions here and there. Nintendo is unusually skilled at introducing a new mechanic in a way that feels like organic play, and slowly ramping up the complexity in a way that will leave most players feeling like natural masters by the end of the level, without realizing that the level was leading them by the nose the entire time.

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Sources

Video by Extra History, played through YouTube.

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