Retro spotlight: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

A good game in its own right, but also the birthplace of Wario.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The original Super Mario Land was a Bizarro World Mario that didn’t fit into the Mario universe we knew of at the time, but that weirdness is part of what made it as fun as it was, and all of that arose from the idea that development studio Nintendo R&D1 didn’t want to be confined to the visions of Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who wasn’t even involved in the development of his invention’s portable debut. Its sequel, 6 Golden Coins, manages to be both a little closer to expectations — mostly in visuals — while also being just as strange. And part of that is because it just straight-up is not a Mario game, even if it’s named that and has you playing as the mustachioed plumber himself. No, it’s a Wario game — the first Wario game.

You don’t get to play as Wario in 6 Golden Coins, no, but he is the antagonist, and what we would come to know as the most basic composition of Wario Land games was here. There was no Wario house style, as it were, in 1992, as there weren’t any games for a character and franchise that didn’t yet exist, but the kind of art and level design and music that separated the Super Mario Land games from their console cousins ended up forming the basis of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, a game that truly is the mirror image of this one in more ways than just its flipped naming convention.

Additional changes would come from there, with even more of an emphasis on finding hidden treasures and a more Metroidvania-ish platformer level design, but you could still find plenty of Super Mario Land 2’s DNA in it all even a few Wario Land games out.

Image credit: Nintendo.co.uk

None of that should be a surprise, either, as Takehiko Hosokawa was a director and the graphic designer on Super Mario Land 2. It’s the first game he was a director for — Hosokawa had previously been a designer on Metroid II: Return of Samus, and while he himself says he began working on 6 Golden Coins as “an assistant character designer,” things clearly escalated during development. He designed most of the enemies, and the enemies are the part that stand out the most, visually, from existing Mario games… and are also the most Wario-like bits of the whole endeavor outside of Wario himself. Which again, makes sense, as Hosokawa’s other game credits include director credits for Wario Land, Wario Land II, and Wario Land 3, while he was also a designer for Wario Land 4. It’s not just him, of course: Hiroji Kiyotake, who designed Wario himself, was also credited as a director and graphic designer on 6 Golden Coins, as well as Wario Land. Kiyotake was a character designer for Wario Land II, a designer on Wario Land 3 and 4, an advisor on the Treasure-developed Wario World, the director for Virtual Boy Wario Land, the graphic designer for Hudson Soft’s Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman!, and stuck around to supervise Wario’s design in other games featuring him after Wario Land 4.

The people in charge of Wario after Super Mario Land 2 were the ones running this game, so it’s no wonder that while in the moment it just felt… different? It now feels like a piece of a larger puzzle. The rest of the puzzle pieces just hadn’t been created yet. Hell, even Mario is given a very Wario-esque quest here. His castle has been taken, and he wants it back. Mario is right to want it back, sure, but that he even has his own castle and lands he lords over is odd for him, and so much more in line with what Wario’s whole deal would end up being. Super Mario Land 2 feels a lot like R&D1 deciding they didn’t actually want to make Mario games, and had to convince their bosses that they should instead be allowed to make what they wanted to. So they created Wario, and the basis for Wario games, and put Mario in it, then pitched for standalone Wario. I mean… in the previously linked interview (translated by Shmuplations) when given the chance to “sum up Super Mario Land 2 in one sentence,” Kiyotake answered with, “Wario’s big debut.” No one was even trying to hide the goal here!

Though, it should be pointed out that, for all that was different about 6 Golden Coins from other Mario games of the time, it’s turned out to be influential on future Mario titles in some subtle and unsubtle ways. The kind of non-traditional enemies that appear in 6 Golden Coins, often taking the form of cartoony versions of real-world creatures like ants or bees, would start to appear more in Mario’s 3D titles as time went on, especially ramping up in the Super Mario Galaxy duology. The environmentally-specific level design that fit a theme more than tended to happen in previous Mario games was something else that carried over into the 3D space. And the way coins were used has seen some carryover, too, though, more subtly.

Your coins don’t turn over after every 100 collected, with an extra life awarded. Instead, they just keep piling up to 999, and you can then try your luck at a Price is Right-esque game of chance, betting just a few coins for a chance at power ups or more coins or extra lives, or you can slap the entire 999 down on the table and pull the level to see whether you’re about to win big or trudge home with your bunny tail… well, I guess those don’t really droop between your legs like that of a dog’s, but you work within the confines of the metaphors the game hands you. There are only a few Mario games where coins keep on piling up like this: 6 Golden Coins, New Super Mario Bros. 2, whose entire point for existence is collecting as many coins as possible always and forever, and Super Mario Odyssey, in which lives have been erased, anyway, and paying coins is the fee to come back to life.

Leaving Wario aside for a moment, it’s incredible that Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 are from not just the same series, but were made on and for the same hardware. Look at the massive differences, three years later; first, a screenshot from Super Mario Land, then one from its sequel:

Image credit: Nintendo

Image credit: Nintendo

The Game Boy was still an 8-bit, monochrome system at this point, but R&D1 had far more experience with it in 1992 than they did in 1989 when it launched, and the results speak for themselves. They made Mario and the familiar objects such as coins look like you’d expect them to, but let everything else be Wario-fied in their design. More cartoony, more expressive, a little darker — hello, walking slasher’s hockey mask with a knife sticking out of it — and it all gave the game its own unique visual style, separate from that of the original game in the series. And yet, by existing outside of the standard Mario visual language, they managed to remain linked despite their own differences.

There are some bits of Super Mario Land 2 that never did make it out of this one game, however. For instance, outside of the mandatory start level and Wario’s castle — the door of which is locked by the titular golden coins scattered across the land — you can approach the game’s worlds in whatever order you wish. It’s all open, and you can start on one and bail to try another. Part of why it’s not normal for Mario is that these games are designed a very specific way, with the idea being that you learn concepts that are built on and become more complex over time. Here, though, in 6 Golden Coins, everything is varied and the repeatable stuff is basic enough that the order you play things in doesn’t matter so much in a structural, educational sense, and so, no order has been imposed. You get the basics from the first (and required) stage, like you do in a Mega Man X game, and then you’re able to go wherever you’d like with the skills you acquired in that brief run, to figure out the rest as it comes.

Which is not the same as saying you can just blow through whatever in this game. It’s not particularly difficult, no, and lives are plentiful even without the coin collecting directly providing them. Ring the bell at a level’s end, and enter into a mini-game that could provide you a power-up, extra live, or, if it’s the crane game and conveyor belt mini-game, you can win up to three lives. You also get a star to appear for every 100 enemies defeated, and defeating just five enemies with this invincibility star will earn you an extra life. However, you do need to pay attention to details in order to find all of the secret stages, of which there are seven. Some are easy enough to figure out — maybe try floating high and following the clouds in the shape of an arrow pointing up in the hippo stage — and others require some leaps of faith or digging around in order to unearth the secret exits that will unlock the bonus areas. You don’t have to find these stages, of course, but they’re often full of opportunities for extra lives, or have some design trait that’s unique to them and worth experiencing.

Another bit that didn’t make it to other Mario titles is the Bunny outfit. Why not, Nintendo? Why can’t Mario have bunny ears? Sure, it works a lot like the tanooki suit or tail from Super Mario Bros. 3, in that Mario can slowly float across and downward while wearing and using it. It’s a little more limited, though, because you can’t fly with it, and Mario can’t do his spin jump while wearing it, either: it’s solely for floating across gaps, or allowing you to reach some areas a regular jump or high jump could not. Those kinds of limitations are useful in level design, and also would be welcome to freshen up series like New Super Mario Bros. Give us the Bunny suit, Nintendo. It’s been 30 years!

That being said, powers like the Bunny suit and the Spaceman outfit that has Mario wearing a helmet to protect him from the vacuum of space only existing in this space do help keep it both charming and worth revisiting. The game plays differently than other Mario titles, with jumping working a little bit differently, the design of everything a little less Mario than Mario, and it being open and letting you just kind of roam back and forth until you get everything you need to challenge Wario. It’s probably for the best that Nintendo mostly left this game alone the way they did, just taking some little bits and pieces here and there for use elsewhere, and letting R&D1 transition the series over to being about Wario all the time. I’ve already argued that the greatest 2D platformer Nintendo has ever made was a Wario one, so hey, you won’t see any complaints from me about 6 Golden Coins kind of being left in the past where it originated. So long as it continues to be for sale — as it is now on the 3DS eShop until it shuts down in March of 2023 — then we’re good here. After all, we did get Wario out of this whole foray, and it’d be a shame to lose access to the first Wario game.

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