 Where's Wario? I'll do you one better. Who's Wario? I'll do you one better. Why is Wario? Wario Where, get it together, is the latest instalment in Nintendo's most bizarre franchise, a series which started as a spin-off from Super Mario Bros, and which is now going back to its platforming roots as players race to complete tiny jumping challenges in mere seconds. The big question is why? Why Wario? Just why? The answer is that sometimes it's more fun to make something weird than to stick to an established formula. The name Wario was invented before his character. The team at Nintendo Research and Development One thought to combine Q-Bad pronunciation, Wario, the Japanese word for bad, with Mario to make Bad Mario. They imagined this new character as the anti-Mario. He seemed like the perfect villain for the game that the team was working on. Super Mario Land 2, six golden coins for the Game Boy. Said director Hiroji Kiyotaka, we imagined Wario as the bluto to Mario's Popeye. The team were, at this point, struggling. They were Nintendo's primary software developers for the Game Boy, and were making good games, but they weren't always very satisfied with the projects they had to work on. Nintendo had several development teams at the time. Research and Development Four, headed up by Shigeru Miyamoto, was cranking out hits like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Research and Development One was then tasked with making portable versions of already popular Nintendo Entertainment System games. They weren't given a lot of freedom to experiment, and all their bottled-up creativity was threatening to burst. They had already begun pushing boundaries with Super Mario Land, a scaled-down version of Super Mario Bros., which they had filled with unorthodox ideas, such as scrolling shooter levels. Now desperate to make Super Mario Land 2 something even more unique, they found themselves going too far beyond the established Mario formula. Said Kiyotaka, with Super Mario Land 2, one of our ideas was not to be bound by the conventions of the previous games. However, when we showed our first draft for everyone, they were like, I don't know, is this Mario? We realized we were on the wrong path, so we toned down that idea and made something a little closer to the existing Mario world. When the time came to follow on from Super Mario Land 2, the team opted to pivot away from Mario and focus on the character they really identified with. Wario was the perfect mascot for R&D 1. Like Wario, the team felt like they were set up to be a carbon copy of an iconic pillar of the Nintendo Empire. Like Wario, R&D 1 didn't want to play by Mario's rules. What followed was a series of inventive Wario Land platformers, because the team didn't need to follow the Mario rulebook, they were able to experiment more, trying out different level designs, power-up solutions, and gameplay mechanics. Wario, though, wasn't the only Nintendo property that R&D 1 were tasked with working on. They moved on to new hardware, creating a game for the ill-fated Nintendo 64 disk drive. Said designer Goro Abe, at the time, our team was working on a game called Mario Artist, Polygon Studio, for the N64DD. As you know, it was an extra accessory for the N64. In Polygon Studio, you could create 3D models and animate them in the game, but there was also a side game included inside. In this game, you would have to play short games that came one after another. This is where the idea for WarioWare came from. This finally gave the team at R&D 1 an outlet for all their pent-up creativity that had nowhere else to go. They took these mini-games and began to expand them. They were concerned, though, that the higher-ups at Nintendo wouldn't approve of their experimentation. They worked on it secretly until they had enough to show off to their manager in the hopes that they could convince him to allow them to finish their work. They had a feeling it would be a hard sell. To their surprise, he simply looked at their prototype and said, okay, so why put WarioWare of all characters front and centre in this new micro-game collection? According to Yoshio Sakamoto, we got the idea of using WarioWare and the other characters because we couldn't think of anyone else who would be best for the role. WarioWare is always doing stupid things and is really idiotic, so we thought him and the rest of the characters would be best for the game. Once the game had been approved, everyone at R&D 1 began making suggestions for tiny micro-games, sticking them on post-it notes on the director's desk. As word of the project spread, even people who weren't involved with the game began offering suggestions. Of course, with such a bizarre game about Wario, not all of the ideas could actually be used, said Koro Abe. There were some games that we didn't include because they were either too obscene or they were too Japanese. There were some games that we thought that people would not understand, so we decided not to use them. Most importantly, if the game was too difficult to play, then we didn't use it. We wanted to make sure that the game was easy to understand and that you could play it with your instinct and just by looking at the screen. If you could not understand what you had to do in the game just by looking at it, then it would be too difficult. The finished game is one of the strangest titles that Nintendo had ever released, at least until the next one. Before long, Wario became the star of far more ridiculous games in this unorthodox series. The moral of the story, don't be afraid to be weird. People may not always appreciate what makes you different. You may be expected to toe the line and act like everyone else. R&D One's experience with Wario shows that, actually, if you can find the right avenue to express yourself, people will embrace your quirks and truly celebrate the things that make you unique.