Lost Levels: Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds
Lost Levels: Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds
[Lost Levels is a semi-monthly (that is, twice a month) column Casual productabout classic games that were never released. It is written by Frank Cifaldi#x, creator of a website about unreleased games titled, appropriately enough, Lost Levels. This column appears on Retronauts on the first and third Friday of every month.]
Since we talked about unreleased Sonic games games last time, I thought it fitting to discuss Mario this week. We only know of a few Mario projects that never made it off the ground, including Miyamoto’s first draft of Super Mario Bros. (the story goes that it was scrapped entirely), a two-player version of Super Mario 64, and an adventure on the Virtual Boy. The trouble is, we know very little about these games, and we probably never will.
One game we do know quite a bit about however is Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds, an officially sanctioned pseudo-sequel to Super Mario World in development for the CD-i, of all platforms, by NovaLogic. Yes,hats, that’s right, the Delta Force guys.
As a lot of you are probably aware of, Nintendo signed a very controversial agreement with Philips in the early 90s to develop a CD-ROM add-on for its Super Nintendo console. The platform Casual productnever materialized (and we should probably talk about why in a future article), but the agreement resulted in two things: one, Philips acquired the licensing rights to use Nintendo characters in games for its CD-i console, and two, Sony - Nintendo’s previous partner for a CD-ROM unit - took its revenge for being stabbed in the back and entered the hardware market on its own with its PlayStation.
According to a recollection written by programmer Silas Warner before his unfortunate death in 2004, the origin of Wacky Worlds came from a meeting with Nintendo. NovaLogic had recently shipped The Rocketeer for the Super Nintendo, and were looking for more work from the company.
“A Nintendo sales executive came up with the idea that maybe simple Nintendo titles could play on the CD-i,” said Warner. “I suspect he was thinking of some kind of adapter to plug a Nintendo #xcartridge into a CD slot! But it set off a frantic race at NovaLogic. The projectCasual product was to put a popular Nintendo game, Super Mario World, onto a CD-i disc.”
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