When asked about his favorite Mario game, Tezuka said he had a soft spot for Super Mario Bros. 3, partly because "in addition to overall game design, I was also doing artwork." After that game, though, he stopped working on the visual art side because "there were just a lot of people that were better than me," he said. That said, Tezuka added that just getting a bunch of industry veterans together to make a game runs the risk of not "keeping up with the times. Really, for me, I have a great interest in how our newer staff members play, what they play, what they think, and what is appealing to them. I think it's very interesting the things we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something."
"Among our staff, there are folks who actually maybe haven't played some of the [older] game titles we're talking about," he said. "So I think there was some familiarization for those folks with some of those titles. And maybe there was some inspiration drawn from those titles that I'm not aware of." Advertisement For a series as long-running as Mario, though, even some of the relatively "younger" development cohort can have a deep history with the series. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri, who joined Nintendo in 1997, recalled playing the original Super Mario Bros. back in elementary school, and being "so moved and awed by the secrets and mysteries I discovered in that game." The Wonder Effects in Wonder were an explicit attempt to recapture that feeling of being young and discovering new things for the first time, which can be difficult in such an established series. Mouri also drew some parallels between Yoshi's Island—where Yoshi could sometimes turn into a vehicle—and Wonder transformation effects that could turn the player into slime or a spiky ball, for instance. "That's not to say that we drew [direct] inspiration from [ Yoshi's Island] or anything, but I think... providing surprises has always been a theme throughout our philosophy," he said.