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Comment by sourthyme | Hacker News Reader

The fact they stopped a NA release of the sequel because Howard Phillips review is amazing to me. Today we see still have games being released regardless if they should (Cyberpunk, Battlefield). Also it proves the importance of play testing to decide if the game is fun for the target demographic. I wonder if Miyamoto took this realization to heart and that is why we see his games so successful.

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That’s easy to do when games are simple to make as they were back then.

Today? There’s too much at stake. $100 million dollar budgets, years of work, crushing deadlines, no way they would bring it all to a halt over one review. Besides, a lot of people will just buy whatever shit you put out as long as the hype is enough, and most games make most of their revenue in those early days after release.

And in the end, if you fuck up real bad, you can just release patches.

It's hard to even imagine this happening now, but it really does seem like it was a smart decision and Howard Phillips was completely correct (based on his gut reaction to playing the Japanese super mario bros 2) about what people did and didn't want, and it definitely does seem like the mario games went in the direction of not being so hard after that, although it's impossible to know if that was the specific reason.

Also, relating to difficult it's interesting that the original game that SMB2 in the U.S. was based on didn't have the B-run ability, and that change made the game substantially easier. Though in that case they may have decided they had to add it in order to be consistent to SMB1, and the decrease in difficulty was just an unintended side-effect. (Also, not having a save feature made the U.S. version a lot harder, so maybe that balances out with adding the run ability.)

This game came out not too long after the video game crash, which happened because the market was flooded by games that were just bad. Nintendo worked really hard to recreate consumer trust by making sure any released game was great.

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