Super Mario 128

Mario has been a gaming icon for decades and has been in more games than can be counted. Although no year in recent memory has gone past without some type of Mario game being released, series fans will remember the nearly decade long drought of original Mario platformers.

From 1997-2005, there was only one new Mario platformer released: Super Mario Sunshine. During the second part of this drought (after Sunshine's release), the mysterious Super Mario 128 was the main focus of the fanbase.

No concrete information was given on the game and, eventually, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto claimed it had simply been a series of test concepts that were never intended to be an actual game.

The mystery faded from memory as the Mario drought finally ended and most people forgot about the game that had once been the center of every Mario fan's imagination.

The Mario drought corresponded with a bad era for Nintendo in terms of console sales. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube did not have the financial success of the earlier Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo, or the later Wii.

For a very proud company that relied solely on video games to make money, this was quite upsetting for the higher ranking employees that were attached to the company and felt its success or failure reflected on them personally.

Nintendo started working on a sequel to the 1996 Super Mario 64 shortly after the game was released, but during the late 90s it became clear that Nintendo was not winning the console war. The Super Mario 64 sequel was restarted from scratch, since the company believed that it was not a substantial enough improvement over the original to turn the tides of the market battle.

Seeing the generally more realistic and violent games on Sony's Playstation, the market leader, Nintendo considered making a Mario that was closer in tone to what the public seemed to want. There was quite a bit of internal conflict over how far to go with this new direction and the new Mario was clearly not going to be ready until Nintendo's next console, the GameCube.

The only hint of this that was released to the public was a comment by Miyamoto that he thought Mario and Luigi should act "more like grown ups" in their games for the (then soon to be released) GameCube.

The new Mario project was ultimately split into two games; Luigi's Mansion, which reflected the darker tone that many felt the series should turn to (although it was still toned down quite a bit compared to what some Nintendo executives and developers wanted), and Super Mario Sunshine, which went in the complete opposite direction.

Both were released within a year of the GameCube and Nintendo felt confident that their new system and Mario games would return them to their former glory as market leader.

As those familiar with gaming history know, they didn't. The GameCube did even worse in market share than the Nintendo 64, and the mass market's taste shifted even more toward violent, realistic games.

During this period, the somber mood at Nintendo intensified and the darker Mario project was revived, this time code named "Super Mario 128". It isn't clear exactly what happened at Nintendo during this period. As we know, nothing called Super Mario 128 was ever released or publicly shown.

The source that revealed the internal strife at Nintendo during the later N64 era refused to discuss what was happening during the time of the GameCube's failure, but released a prototype of Super Mario 128 online that can be played on the Wii homebrew channel.