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:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“The highest form of development is to govern one’s self.”
—Zerelda G. Wallace (1817–1901)