'I remember being pulled over to Fuji Television one day, being handed a sheet with game characters on it and being told, 'I want you to make a game with this,'' Tanabe said. By the same token, picking up the other player and throwing him turned into picking up enemy characters.ĭoki Doki Panic was actually part of a deal with the Fuji corporation, in which Nintendo would produce a tie-in videogame for a media-technology expo called Yume Kōjō, or 'Dream Factory.' The mascot characters invented for this expo were the stars of the game. 'Picking up blocks was the same thing as pulling out vegetables from the ground.''Picking up blocks was the same thing as pulling out vegetables from the ground,' he said. But some purists felt the gameplay wasn't what they wanted out of Mario: They were used to stomping on enemies to flatten them, not picking them up and throwing them around, a small but fundamental change that gave Mario 2 a significantly different feel.Īlthough the initial concept for the game had been scrapped, the development of that original two-player cooperative prototype inspired all the innovative gameplay of Super Mario Bros. Since it was developed by the Mario team, Doki Doki Panic's colorful world, catchy music and gorgeous artwork fit in well with Nintendo's star characters. This was the game that Western audiences knew as Super Mario Bros.

Instead, Nintendo used Doki Doki Panic, swapping the game's characters out for the Mario cast.

That title wasn't released outside Japan. 2 was a totally different game, a set of super-difficult new levels built with the original game's engine and graphics. The game released in Japan as Super Mario Bros.

The Mario sequel was originally released in Japan as Doki Doki Panic, starring a wholly different cast of characters. You may already know the rest of the story. 'As long as it's fun, anything goes,' Tanabe remembers Miyamoto saying. He suggested that Tanabe add in traditional side-scrolling gameplay and 'make something a little bit more Mario-like.' 'Miyamoto looked at it and said, 'Maybe we need to change this up,'' Tanabe recalled. And playing it with just one person wasn't very fun. While the prototype featured two players jumping, stacking up blocks to climb higher, and throwing each other around, the technical limitations of the primitive NES made it difficult to build a polished game out of this complex action.

2 player mario bros