Imagesource: NINTENDO

Probably no internal game franchise has been ridden as hard as Nintendo's Super Mario. The sheer number of different titles for countless hardware platforms in 2D and 3D have almost always been a license to print money. 💴

And for those who grew up with the 2-dimensional variants on the NES and Gameboy, and never really warmed up to the 3D monstrosities, perhaps they've secretly hoped for a new Super Mario in just 2 dimensions.

Would that be a step backward? It certainly depends on one's perspective, but age-old concepts that have been a guaranteed success for a long time don't necessarily have to be forcibly updated with new technologies. After all, you can put lipstick on a pig... but no matter how much lipstick and powder you use, a pig remains a pig. 💄🐷

It seems this realization has also dawned internally at Nintendo. After 11 years of a 2-dimensional hiatus, we can look forward to a new Mario title that doesn't venture into the third dimension.

For Super Matrio Bros. Wonder, the Japanese game forge has brought onboard a number of well-known figures (or more likely locked them into a bunch of cubicles 👹): Takashi Tezuka, Shiro Mouri, Koichi Hayashida, Masanobu Sato, and Koji Kondo will surely be familiar to those who wait for the end of a game's credits (and also stay seated in the cinema until the curtain drops).

The title will first be released for the Switch, and a whopping 2,000 suggestions for gameplay innovations contribute to what Nintendo calls the Wonder Effect.

The anticipation is real.