Our Super Mario Bros Wonder review likens the stellar platformer to "your first magical visit to Disneyland," so I was caught off guard when one of its developers casually shared one of the most horrifying ideas I've ever heard: "an eight-heads-tall, life-sized, live-action Mario."
We can thank sound director Koji Kondo for this mental image. As the Wonder team explained in an Ask the Developer interview posted to the main Nintendo website, the game's design leads regularly solicited gameplay ideas from everyone on the team no matter their tenure or area of focus, which is how they ended up with over 2,000 sticky notes of inspiration. Kondo says "I also contributed a lot of suggestions at the idea-sharing session," and for better and worse, one of them never saw the light of day.