Mr Viral
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Over the holiday season, we’re republishing some of the best articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our Best of 2024 series. Enjoy!
While the Super Mario series can get quite weird with its lore, world design, and general concepts, nothing comes close to the sheer absurdity of the WarioWare franchise. How many games out there let you pick someone’s nose, perform dental work, and have a back-scratching competition with Mario? While on paper these activities may sound like the last things you’d want to spend your coveted game time on, they’re executed masterfully and delightful to play.
For decades, we’ve been puzzled as to how the folks over at Intelligent Systems and Nintendo come up with the microgames that make up the WarioWare series. Where do these ideas come from? How many are left on the drawing board? Where does one even begin to develop so many different micro projects? To get some answers, we recently had the chance to chat with Goro Abe, who was not only the Chief Director on the latest game WarioWare: Move It!, but has been with the series almost exclusively as a programmer, designer, and director since the very beginning.
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