Super Mario Bros. Wonder ditched time limits, and it’s huge

Super Mario Bros. WonderThe game is an endless kaleidoscopic celebration of new innovations, which throws out ideas faster than the player can absorb them. Nintendo’s designers delight in constantly turning the game’s world upside down, sometimes literally. But there’s an extent to which this is just par for the course for the series. Super Mario games have always been about breaking their own rules, as far back as the moment in 1985’s Super Mario Bros.Mario ran invisibly along the edge of the screen after jumping off its top.

Nonetheless, Wonder The game breaks some rules never before broken by 2D Mario. One of these changes in particular is discreet to the point of being invisible — a simple omission that the game never draws attention to — but it has a profound impact. I’m talking about the removal of the timer.

From the 1985 original until 2019’s New Super Mario Bros. U DeluxeIn the upper left corner, you will see a countdown timer. This was often a generous time limit, as you were just as, if no more likely to fail the level by losing your patience or lives than running out. The timer was still present. It was like a clock ticking every second. The timer warned that the clock was ticking down. You can’t do it all. Don’t rush, but do hurry. The familiar fanfare will sound and your heartbeat will speed up as the minute nears. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic… panic!!!

For almost 40 years, Nintendo has clung to the timer as a core design principle of 2D Mario games, even as it started to look increasingly archaic — a vestige of arcade-game philosophy, from a time when mainstream game design framed games as skill challenges first and experiences second, rather than the other way around.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

Super Mario Bros. Wonder finally ditches the timer, and it’s a revelation. It can be seen as an accessibility move first and foremost — one of many adjustments the game makes to be more welcoming and flexible, if not necessarily easier, than past Super Mario Bros. titles. It is also less frustrating to play the game now. But its removal goes far deeper than that, changing the way players play the game — and the way Nintendo’s developers designed it.

It is crucial that it allows WonderMario’s experience has always been centered around exploration and experimentation, which were made difficult by those precious seconds. Designers have devised levels that are packed with interactive details and cleverly hidden surprises. This allows players to explore and experiment. Mario’s philosophy, which has always been to hunt down secrets, is now hard-coded in the game design. The search for each stage’s Wonder Flower, Wonder Seeds, and Flower Coins is a core goal in Wonder — the kind of treasure hunt the 3D games have always done but 2D Mario has treated more peripherally, partly due to that time limit.

Conversely, the absence of a timer means that when the designers actively want that heedless, headlong rush 2D Mario can be so good at, they’re driven to engineer it themselves, which they do with typical ingenuity, wit, and surreal spectacle, reaching deep into Mario’s infinite bag of tricks: slippery surfaces, zip lines, vanishing platforms, gauntlets of hair-trigger traps, thundering stampedes of fat, candy-colored bison. 2D Mario’s wild momentum is still present in Wonder, it’s just one of a suite of even more intentionally crafted moods.

Removing the time limit makes 2D Mario much better; it’s a simple tweak that frees and empowers both players and designers. Nintendo had to have removed the time limit a long while ago. It chose the best game for it.