History of Paper Mario – Paper Mario Is Now 20 Years Old

20 years ago, on August 11, 2000, Paper Mario hopped onto the N64 and onto store shelves after four years of development time. In celebration of Paper Mario’s 20 year anniversary, let’s take a look at the history behind this spin-off series.

Nintendo have quite the knack for putting their own unique spin on game genres. Throughout the years, they’ve managed to push out many different masterpieces – some of which completely take a genre and flip it upside down, introducing to it their Nintendo charm and unique game mechanics. One such genre that Nintendo hadn’t quite dabbled much in yet early on was role-playing games.

RPGs like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest became massive successes with their sales numbers going off the charts. While early on with the NES, Nintendo did publish quite a few RPGs as first party titles on their consoles, aside from the Mother game, Nintendo (to our knowledge) never developed a single RPG game in-house. Mother was originally released to the Japanese market back in 1989 and didn’t make its way to the states until 2015 when it became available on the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Jumping on over to the SNES, we now see Nintendo dabbling with the RPG with its release of Super Mario RPG. It’s important to note though that this game was in fact not developed by Nintendo, but instead was a product of Square. Shigeru Miyamoto was still heavily involved in overseeing the development of the game, but still this was not an in-house RPG game developed by Nintendo themselves.

Even if not developed in-house, Super Mario RPG was an important game because through its charm, character building, and unique game mechanics, it went on to sell fairly well. This in turn led Nintendo to see the potential in pursuing further Mario themed RPG games.

Intelligent Systems and Paper Mario

When we jump ahead to the N64, Nintendo no longer had their buddy Square available to help work on a new Mario RPG game. During this time frame, Square had been contracted into an exclusivity agreement with Sony, meaning they would only be able to bring their newest Final Fantasy game to the PS1. With Square out of the picture, Nintendo began talking with Intelligent Systems.

Nintendo and Intelligent Systems already had a decent relationship at this time as they were the company behind the Famicom Wars and the Fire Emblem series. Nintendo saw first hand that Intelligent Systems were well versed in developing fully fledged RPGs heavy on the story building and battle mechanics and decided to to ask them to handle the new Mario themed RPG for the N64.

Intelligent Systems got to work on Paper Mario not long after the N64 became available to the Japanese market. The original concept was to just create a Super Mario RPG 2, but Intelligent Systems was struggling with taking the visual style and translating it from 2D to the now polygonal 3D.

How Paper Mario Got Its Paper Aesthetic

This graphical dilemma then led to what we now know as the game’s “paper” look. Backgrounds in the game are three-dimensional with a polygonal look, but the characters themselves are flat and have a paper aesthetic.

Nintendo’s producer Hiroyasu Sasano said the following in an interview at the time: “The reason we went this direction is we thought players might be getting tired of the 3D CG look on the Playstation and other consoles. It’s hard to bring out cuteness with characters made from polygons, right?. Even Mario was made with polygons in Mario 64, so we thought it would be nice to offer something different and came upon making Mario’s world with a pastel touch. However, making an entire 2D world like a Super Nintendo game and releasing it for the N64 would be pointless, so we gave the field depth and made it 3D. I think it’s been thoughtfully crafted.”

While there was no obvious mention of the graphical dilemma that Intelligent Systems faced which led to the flat paper style theme of the characters, this unique art style was very “Nintendo-esque” and fit well. It was relatively akin to that of the art style seen in Yoshi’s Story for the Super Nintendo. A cutesy aesthetic was front and center and became an overall theme of the series.

We went over earlier that Intelligent System began work on Paper Mario right at the launch of the N64 in Japan. The company continued working the the title for four years and when the game eventually did release on August 11, 2000, the Nintendo 64 was about to be bid adieu in light of Nintendo’s newest console at the time, the Gamecube. Paper Mario released in Japan with the name “Mario Story”, but saw its name shift for the U.S. market the following year.

Paper Mario went on to sell well even with the N64 nearly being on the way out. The game’s quirky yet familiar characters, unique battle system, and funny dialogue had players hooked.

Unlike previous RPG entries before it, Paper Mario had a casual element to it. RPGs had garnered a reputation of being intense grindy titles that required hours of enemy battling and traversing locations in order to level up and slowly progress. Paper Mario wasn’t like that – it was a simple yet fun and quirky adventure that players could immediately jump into without needing to consult strategy guides.

Paper Mario’s Unique Battle System

The battle system in Paper Mario was also unique for its time. Traditional RPGs had players simply choosing available attacks from a list style text menu then waiting as their attacks appeared on-screen to then be followed up by enemy attacks. All of this happened automatically, with players not really needing to continue paying attention. Intelligent Systems took the time based attack mechanic from Super Mario RPG (where players could press buttons to increase damage dealt to enemies) and focused this as the game’s core battle mechanic. Players could increase their attack damage and defense simply by pressing the correct buttons at the right time. This took something which often felt tedious (and after a certain point in grind heavy games often became boring) and gave players more control, keeping them involved.

While we now come to an end, it really must be stated that Paper Mario without a doubt helped change the idea of what an RPG was. No longer were RPGs only for hardcore gamers looking to immerse themselves in grind heavy adventures, but rather anyone could pick up a controller and become invested in a simple adventure with RPG mechanics. It was not a single handed effort that caused this shift and made the RPG genre more mainstream, but Paper Mario was a key factor and with the recent release of Paper Mario: The Origami King on the Nintendo Switch, the series still is going strong today.