Development
The game was produced by Gunpei Yokoi, who previously produced Donkey Kong (1981), Donkey Kong Jr. (1982), Mario Bros. (1983) and Metroid (1986). It featured music written by Hirokazu Tanaka, who also composed for Duck Hunt (1984). Hiroshi Yamauchi, then president of Nintendo, wanted a Mario game to be on the Game Boy, and ordered Yokoi to create the game with his development team, Nintendo Research & Development 1. This would be the first original portable Mario game since the others made for the Game and Watch. This would also be the first Mario game developed without Shigeru Miyamoto, Yokoi's protege and creator of Mario and The Legend of Zelda. Early in conceptual development, they decided to recreate the classic gameplay of the 1985 original in new worlds that took Mario far from the Mushroom Kingdom. It seemed like the perfect title to help sell their new system. Yokoi's take on Mario helped the Game Boy surpass the NES as Nintendo's best selling platform, and the game itself just surpassed Super Mario Bros. 3's sales figures.
Initially, Nintendo planned to package Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, but decided to package Tetris instead at the insistence of Henk Rogers, who convinced Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa that a Mario title would only sell the Game Boy to young boys instead of everyone. This was the first game that released for the original Game Boy.
Read more about this topic: Super Mario Land
Famous quotes containing the word development:
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—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I have an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassment affecting the growth of her independent political power, and the preservation of her territorial integrity.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)