2015 sees Super Mario Bros. mark 30 years since it first launched in Japan, although, aside from Mario Maker, Nintendo won’t be celebrating with a new Mushroom Kingdom adventure.
That’s according to Nintendo of America’s Bill Trinen who reasoned that, while Mario games release more frequently than the company’s other series, they are trying to avoid annualising the Italian plumber’s escapades.
“Internally, what teams do when working on a new game — even if it’s an existing series — is to start out fresh and figure out what the focus will be this time. We don’t always put out a new version of an existing series on an annual basis, there’s always a big gap,” Trinen shared with Reno Gazette-Journal.
“You see that with Super Smash Bros., which has been seven years since it last came out. With Pikmin 3, you saw a big gap as well. Mario games release more frequently but we don’t have a new Mario game this year so it’s not an annual event. The teams focus on how they can recreate the gameplay experience or introduce new ideas to those games, which is what they did with NES Remix, for example.”
However back in April, Nintendo EAD Tokyo’s Yoshiaki Koizumi shared with EDGE that they had already begun developing Mario’s next adventure, although wouldn’t indicate whether it was for Wii U or Nintendo 3DS. Maybe we can expect to see that in 2016, then.
Nintendo confirm no new Mario game for 2015
