The Secret History of Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 2’s long, strange trip to the top of the charts in 1988 began with a prototype videogame that failed miserably.
The 8-bit classic, which became a massive hit for the Nintendo Entertainment System, grew out of a mock-up of a vertically scrolling, two-player, cooperative-action game, Super Mario Bros. 2 director Kensuke Tanabe told Wired.com in an interview at this year’s Game Developers Conference.
The prototype, worked up by SRD, a company that programmed many of Nintendo’s early games, was intended to show how a Mario-style game might work if the players climbed up platforms vertically instead of walking horizontally, said Tanabe.
