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There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that Tim Rogers loves Mario. These days, Tim spends most of his time designing his own video games (his latest, Videoball, is due out later this year). For years, however, he was better known for his game-focused writing, including an essay on what he calls "sticky friction" and a glowing 10,000 word review of Super Mario Bros. 3. It seems unlikely that anyone on this Earth who isn't a Nintendo employee has spent more time thinking about Mario's moveset. So what happens when we give him the tools to make his own Mario stage?
This is the second installment of our Devs Make Mario series, where we task our favorite game developers with creating their own course using Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. A few weeks ago, we visited Rogers' Oakland home with a pre-release version of the game and let him loose with the tools for a few hours. The results: a dense, minimal stage called "Honkin' on Down to Choomtown."
"The whole idea (of this level) is there's a high area and a low area, but it's not super gimmicky. It's kind of like a Sonic the Hedgehog level – consider the naturalism of Sonic level, where they would just make a big horizontal area with a couple screens of verticality and carve out holes that allow you to get between those different levels and planes."
Above, watch Tim guide you through his design process before exploring his final creation in its entirety – a stage so dense that it actually takes two full playthroughs to see everything it has in store.
Got a game developer you'd like to see try their hand at Mario Maker? Let us know in the comments and they may appear in a future episode!
(Music: NΣΣT - "Dim Sum")
