Last year CD-i member FLBond wrote an article about Super Mario's Wacky Worlds for the Super Mario Multiverse. Let's travel back and enjoy his love for Mario in general and CD-i specifically. Super Mario's Wacky Worlds remained unreleased on CD-i. The only studio that was able to finish a Mario CD-i title, was the internal Philips Fantasy Factory. In fact, this studio was overseeing the process of Novalogic's Super Mario World clone, did you know that? We don't know a lot about the Philips Fantasy Factory. It is interesting to me because it is the only Philips studio who made a Nintendo title. Yes, all the other Zelda games were contract jobs given out by Philips. Just like with Super Mario's Wacky World. It is a pleasure to meet the people who were behind this.
Thankfully our contact list made it to Steve: "You do remember correctly. I was a Vice President of development as well as the Executive Producer of the Fantasy Factory projects. I would be happy to answer any questions that I can, so just let me know." He was the Philips guy overseeing the Super Mario's Wacky Worlds part, which was a contract job for Novalogic for Philips". Apparently though, Novalogic cancelled the project without Philips knowing it. So it will be interesting to hear his side of the story. We'll remember the Philips Fantasy Factory as one of the least productive studios regarding to the amount of games that they have released. It was based in the USA and released two titles on CD-i: -Name that Tune (1993) and -Hotel Mario (1994).
FLBond: "It all starts in 1993, with a development team called Novalogic, making games for computers and home consoles, and great fans of Nintendo games. Novalogic have got their chance to make one real Mario game. Their last release, Rocketeer on SNES, was successful enough for Philips to let them work on it. Their main goal : making a Super Mario World sequel. Designing a game for the Philips CD-i is not the same as on the SNES. Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds is the first game to be featured on CD-ROM and drawing is easier. According to John Brooks, lead programmer, CD is “hundreds of times larger than rom cartridges of that era”, and allows Novalogic to try a lot of new things for the Mario saga. Music now can leave the MIDI format and gains some instruments and depth."
Alan: "You know after playing the CD-i prototype I definitely think it had potential. Another really cool thing that I've recently learned is that Silas Warner was a programer on this project. Silas Warner, as in the guy who created wolfenstein! It was never a full game since it was never completed. It would have likely been a good game, some go as far to say that it would've been the cd-i's best game, in fact.
But, the prototype, which basically contains all the of the game that was developed, is not much fun . You can bascially run through a level, as mario and jump on enemies, which is sorta cool. It's a prototype and the levels are of course incomplete, you can't advance to the next level. But, its like super mario world except you can't very much. Just some test levels."
Why was Super Mario's Wacky Worlds on CD-i never finished, while everyone agrees this title had huge potential on CD-i? CD-i member Catpix made an interesting observation, something that was not clearly stated in the various interviews we had with the developers before. Catpix: "There are contradictory claims about that question but games weren't the main focus of the CD-i. Even though you can find people claiming [Philips focused on games, ed], there's also testimonies of programmers showing games to Philips executives that were flabbergasted by the results [The story of SPC Vision, ed]; obviously even if they thought about games being a selling point of the CD-i, they never understood what could be done with it.
That also might be a factor of the CD-i "[not being prepared, ed]" for being a proper console: Again, Philips executives's lack of *knowledge* about video gaming might have led them to believe they could do better than what they could realistically expect. "it's made obvious by how they handled the Mario and Zelda franchises : why was Super Mario's Wacky Worlds never completed? Well because, from insider's words, the company never intented to make that game! Philips had offered a developement kit and money to anyone able to show them a working prototype. But Philips forgot about adding that it should result in a working game at the end, so Super Mario's Wacky Worlds was programmed in 2 weeks and when the company got the money, that was the end of it. They ran with the development kit and money and Philips couldn't do anything about it."
OK. We have spoken to various ex-developers of Super Mario's Wacky Worlds to believe this is not the whole story, but in between the lines I still believe this general thought was actually happening. In the case of Mario Takes America a developer told us how easy Philips was in granting money to relatively unknown developers (CIGAM was just a start-up) to show Philips what could be done on the CD-i platform. This ended up in various developers showing a prototype but lacking the resources to actually complete a full CD-i game.
Happy Mario's Day!
[Thanks, FLBond, catpix, Alan. Sprites ripped by DL. Cover art by Videogame Obsession]