Super Mario World
Super Mario World (produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, with art by Shigefumi Hino) was one of Nintendo’s launch games for the Super Famicom in August 1991. Packaged with early sales of the SNES in the USA, it is one of the most-played console games.
The Super Mario games were enormously influential, setting many standards that remain familiar to gamers to this day: a hub world; levels that can be revisited and re-explored to find their secrets; bonus levels accessible to players who find the secrets; a reward for finding all the secrets.
The deceptively simple gameplay conceals a great deal of depth. (Not all of the games that drew on SMW have succeeded in realizing this depth.) Every level presents something new: a new enemy, a new kind of moving platform, a new trap. Almost everything in the world has multiple uses, some quickly apparent, some discoverable only by a brave player willing to sacrifice many lives to experimentation. The power-ups are almost all available in the earliest levels, not carefully rationed through the 96 levels. But it takes a lot of time with the game to master them. In most situations there are several ways to proceed, and it’s rare to feel, as you so often do in some other platform games, that you are merely tracing a sequence of jumps planned for you by the level designer.