Super Mario's Wacky Worlds (Philips CD-i)

1992-1993 NovaLogic

Platform: Philips CD-i

It still feels strange to imagine a traditional Super Mario platform game appearing on anything other than Nintendo hardware, but thanks to Nintendo’s short-lived agreement with Philips, that almost became a reality.

Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds was in development at NovaLogic as a follow-up of sorts to Super Mario World, bringing Mario to the Philips CD-i in what promised to be a globe-trotting adventure. Rather than taking place in Dinosaur Land, the game would have seen Mario travelling across real-world inspired locations including Ancient Greece, Egypt, haunted castles, pirate ships, jungles, the Arctic and a series of increasingly bizarre “wacky” worlds filled with neon cities, geometric landscapes and giant pipeworks.

Unlike the SNES original, the environments were all hand drawn, with artist Nina Stanley creating colourful backdrops inspired by real locations. She recalled that the project marked the first time she had created all of her artwork on a Macintosh using Photoshop 2, before painstakingly cutting every individual tile by hand and importing them into the game using a primitive DOS tool. Despite the cumbersome process, she felt some of the artwork, particularly the pirate ship environments, was among her best work at the time.

The prototype that has managed to sneak out shows a surprisingly varied game, albeit one still very much in early development stage. Mario is only able to walk and jump, with many core gameplay elements yet to be implemented. Enemies cannot properly interact with the player, many exits do not function correctly, and entire worlds exist only as names within the level selection. Even so, there is enough content to explore what the team had planned.

The game itself was created largely to demonstrate that a traditional Nintendo platform game could work on the CD-i hardware. Early demonstrations reportedly impressed Nintendo, and development continued for around a year. By the final known prototype, much of the artwork and overall design had been completed, although the programming still had a long way to go before the game would have been ready for release.

For many years it was widely assumed that the project had simply fallen victim to disappointing CD-i sales. However, Nina later explained to us that the situation was rather different. According to Nina, the project’s lead programmer left NovaLogic to join Electronic Arts and no replacement could be found to continue the work. She too would later move to EA, and with the team effectively dispersed, Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds was quietly cancelled before it could be completed.

Thankfully, prototype builds eventually surfaced, allowing players to experience one of the most unusual chapters in Mario’s history. Although very incomplete, they provide a fascinating glimpse into what could have become yet another surprising Nintendo-based release on the CD-i platform.

With thanks to Nina Stanley sharing recollections back in 2019 for The Games That Weren’t Book.