Super Mario Galaxy

2007 video game

The game's main hub is the Comet Observatory, a spaceship which contains six domes that provide access to most of the game's 42 available galaxies, with each dome except one holding five. Five domes end with a boss level in which the objective is to defeat Bowser or Bowser Jr. and earn a special Power Star, known as a Grand Star, that gives the player access to the next dome. The player only has access to one galaxy when they begin the game; as more Power Stars are collected, more galaxies and Stars become available. The player is awarded the ability to play as Luigi after collecting 120 Power Stars as Mario. Once 120 Power Stars are collected with both characters, the player is rewarded one further challenge which, upon completion, awards the player with the final two stars, and two commemorative pictures of the characters that can be sent to the Wii Message Board.

The player character is controlled via the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. While most of Mario's abilities are taken directly from Super Mario 64, such as the long jump, wall jumps, and a variety of somersaults, a new feature called the Star Pointer that uses the Wii Remote's motion sensor is included. It is a small blue cursor that appears when the Wii Remote pointer is pointed at the screen. The Star Pointer is used to pick up special konpeito shaped objects called "Star Bits", which can then be shot to stun enemies, manipulate obstacles, or feed Hungry Lumas (star shaped sentient beings). The second player can also make Mario jump, and the height of Mario's jump can be increased if the first and second player press the A button at the same time. The second player can prevent some enemies from moving by aiming the pointer star at them and holding the A button.

The centennial Star Festival is held to watch a comet in the Mushroom Kingdom. On the night of the Star Festival, Princess Peach discovers a star shaped creature called a Luma and invites Mario to come to the festival to see the Luma she discovered. Just as Mario arrives at the town, Bowser invades the Mushroom Kingdom in a fleet of airships, littering the landscape with fireballs and petrifying its citizens in crystals. He invites Peach to his creation of his galaxy and removes Peach's castle from its foundations using a giant flying saucer, and lifts it into outer space. Kamek, one of Bowser's minions, launches Mario, who tried to rescue Princess Peach, into space and he eventually lands on a small planet from Kamek's magic while the Luma escapes from Peach's hands. On the planet, Mario wakes up after being knocked unconscious and meets the Luma that Peach found earlier, along with the space Princess Rosalina and her star shaped companions, the Lumas. Rosalina describes herself as a watcher of the stars who uses the Comet Observatory to travel across the universe. However, Bowser has stolen all of the Power Stars that act as the Observatory's power source, rendering it immobile. Bestowed with the power to travel through space through one of the Lumas, Mario sets off on a journey across the universe to reclaim the Power Stars and restore power to Rosalina's observatory. Along the way, he finds friends from the Mushroom Kingdom such as Luigi and the Toads while fighting Bowser and Bowser Jr. at certain points. Upon collecting enough Power Stars, the Comet Observatory flies to the center of the universe, where Bowser is holding Peach captive. While confronting Bowser, Mario learns that he plans to rule the entire universe with Peach at his side. Mario defeats Bowser and frees Peach, but one of the galaxy's planets collapses on itself, becoming a supermassive black hole that begins consuming the entire universe. The Lumas sacrifice themselves and jump into the black hole to destroy it, causing the black hole to collapse into a singularity and the universe is recreated entirely as the singularity explodes in a huge supernova. Rosalina appears to Mario, revealing that dying stars are later reborn as new stars. When the universe is recreated, Mario awakens in the Mushroom Kingdom, which was recreated in the supernova, alongside Peach and Bowser, and he celebrates the new galaxy that has emerged in the skies. If the player collects 120 stars, Rosalina will thank the player and, with the reborn Lumas, leave aboard the Comet Observatory to travel the cosmos again.

The concept for Super Mario Galaxys gameplay originated from ideas taken from Super Mario 128, a technology demonstration shown at Nintendo Space World in 2000 to exemplify the processing power of the GameCube. The demonstration's director (and future director of Super Mario Galaxy), Yoshiaki Koizumi, desired that one of its distinguishing features, spherical based platforms, should be used in a future game, but was held back in belief that such a feature would be impossible for technical reasons. Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto suggested to work on the next large scale Mario game after Nintendo EAD Tokyo finished development on Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in late 2004, pushing for the spherical platform concept to be realised. Takeo Shimizu, the game's producer and programmer, noted that the most basic action in a 3D action game was to simply run, and concluded that the easiest way to attack was to "spin", not jump. Prior to the development team shifting focus on the Wii and realising the potential of its different controls, the "spin" attack was originally planned to be executed by swivelling the analogue stick on the GameCube controller. To balance out the difficulty, Koizumi suggested that Mario's health meter should have a maximum capacity of three instead of eight, but at the same time more 1 Up Mushrooms and checkpoints would be placed in the game. Koizumi said that he wanted to alter the game's "intensity factor" by limiting the number of hits the player could take to three, as opposed to Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, which featured eight. Retrospectively, Iwata added that decreasing the health meter to three from eight is "representative of the things that players do not notice that actually changes the gameplay dramatically". Koichi Hayashida, a co designer of the game, initially expressed scepticism of incorporating a spherical playing field into a jump based platform game, stating that it would be "a bad match". Shimizu also had a negative reaction to the idea, with his main concern being that the implementation of spherical platforms would be impossible to achieve due to technical reasons, and "felt a sense of danger" when the plan was eventually approved. However, once Shimizu started debugging the game he realised that the experience felt "totally fresh" and thought that he was "playing a game like nothing that's come before it". Iwata noted that Mario's Bee Suit was popular with women, and also stated that the titular character's other suits were designed to add variations to the gameplay. According to Hayashida, the idea to include transformations in the game came from Koizumi. One of the female members of staff who worked on Super Mario Galaxy wrote a note saying "I want a Bee Mario" when asked by Koizumi what they wanted to transform Mario into. Shirai stated that the development team always discussed their ideas together, and devised ways to incorporate an idea into the game and make it more entertaining. Iwata concluded that having the game take place in space was advantageous, as it was flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of ideas. Latin American percussion instruments had already been featured in previous Super Mario installments, such as steelpans, bongo drums, and congas. For Super Mario Galaxys theme, Yokota used Latin American instruments and a synthesiser to replicate the sounds featured in old science fiction films. The composition was approved by Yoshiaki Koizumi, the game's director and designer, but when Yokota presented it to the game's sound supervisor, Koji Kondo, Miyamoto chose the orchestral piece, as it sounded the most "space like". Yokota stated that Miyamoto chose the piece without knowing that Kondo actually wrote it. The game's soundtrack features 28 orchestral songs performed by a 50 person symphony orchestra. Yokota initially had concerns whether or not orchestral music would fit in with the rhythm of a Mario game, but thought that such music would make the scale of the game "seem more epic". Kondo, on the other hand, believed if orchestral music were used the player would be "obligated to play the game in time to the music". although the soundtrack became available to European Club Nintendo members in November 2008. The soundtrack was released in two versions: the Original Soundtrack, which only contains 28 tracks from the game, and the Platinum Edition, which contains another 53 tracks on a second disc for a total of 81 tracks.

Super Mario Galaxy received Game of the Year 2007 awards from IGN, GameSpot, Nintendo Power, Kotaku, and Yahoo! Games. The game was also perceived as the highest ranking title in 2007 according to the review aggregator GameRankings. In February 2008, Super Mario Galaxy received the "Adventure Game of the Year" award during the AIAS 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; it also received nominations for "Overall Game of the Year", "Console Game of the Year", "Outstanding Achievement in Game Design", "Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering" and "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming". Super Mario Galaxy placed third in the Official Nintendo Magazines "100 greatest Nintendo games of all time" list. In 2009, the game won the "Game of the Year" BAFTA at the 5th British Academy Games Awards, surpassing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and becoming the first Nintendo game to win this award, whilst in the same year, Super Mario Galaxy was named the number one Wii game by IGN. It was also named by Eurogamer and IGN as the "Game of the Generation". In 2015, the game placed 11th on USgamers "15 Best Games Since 2000" list. Guinness World Records ranked Super Mario Galaxy 29th in their list of top 50 console games of all time based on initial impact and lasting legacy. In their final issue, the Official Nintendo Magazine ranked Super Mario Galaxy as the greatest Nintendo game of all time. The soundtrack also won the "Best Design in Audio" award from Edge.

In the 1,000th issue of Famitsu, Miyamoto expressed his interest in making a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy. The game was originally called "Super Mario Galaxy More" during development, and was initially going to feature variations of planets featured in Super Mario Galaxy. Over time, new elements and ideas were brought into the game, and it was decided that the game would be a full sequel. Super Mario Galaxy 2 was announced during the Nintendo conference at E3 2009 held in Los Angeles. It was released on 23 May 2010 in North America, 27 May 2010 in Japan and on 11 June 2010 in Europe. The sequel has been met with as much critical acclaim as its predecessor, and has sold 6.36 million copies worldwide as of April 2011. Super Mario Galaxy, as well as several other Wii games, was rereleased for Nvidia's Shield TV in China on 22 March 2018 as the result of a partnership between Nintendo, Nvidia and iQiyi. The game runs on the Shield via an emulator, but has interface and control modifications, and support for 1080p resolution. Due to the lack of motion controls on the Shield, some controls are remapped; for example, the on screen pointer is remapped to the right analogue stick and the button to choose a Galaxy is remapped to the right trigger. The game is included alongside Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine in the Super Mario 3D All Stars collection on Nintendo Switch. It was released on 18 September 2020.