Game Theory: Super Mario Bros. Wonder may be Nintendo's most elegant online game ever

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

That’s for understandable reasons, at least in part. The company’s games have always skewed younger, leading to genuine fears that the Great Illicit Online might use your third-grader’s good friend Mario as a conduit to the planet’s youth, who they would then heap with, at bare and awful minimum, the usual digital avalanche of verbal abuse and trash talk. It’s a big reason why the company has always lagged roughly a generation behind its major competitors when it comes to online gaming: Everything needed to come wrapped in several extra layers of online protection (ah, Friend Codes) to ensure it wasn’t being used for outright evil.

But the divide also seemed, more often than not, to be philosophical. Although Nintendo has frequently been at the forefront of multiplayer gaming—the company’s sports titles are pretty much second to nobody, across multiple decades of work—it’s never been all that interested in courting the online multiplayer audience. Sure, there are outliers, in the form of the company’s non-violent online shooter series Splatoon, and the Smash Bros. fighting game franchise’s slow embrace of internet connectivity. But it’s only really been with its latest console, the Switch, that Nintendo has gotten seriously into internet multiplayer, developing oddball ideas like Tetris 99 and its various spin-offs, efforts to make Nintendo games that interface with modern gaming trends while still feeling, distinctly, like Nintendo games.

In that context, the company’s latest flagship title, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, is a hell of a thing. On the surface, it’s a standard modern Mario game, which is to say that it’s fantastic: Inventive, surprising, and executed to something approximating absolute technical perfection. (We don’t want to get too sidetracked from the online stuff here, but it’s fascinating to see the “bite-sized brilliance” structure Nintendo pushed the series toward with Bowser’s Fury in 2021 being retrofitted to the franchise’s more traditional sidescrolling gaming; it’s also the Mario game that feels most like a Wario Land game, which is about as high as praise from us gets.)

But while the game obviously has the now-standard four-person couch co-op gameplay that the sidescrolling Mario games first incorporated with 2009’s New Super Mario Bros. Wii (a chaotic treat, as ever), it also incorporates online multiplayer features. Not direct multiplayer, mind you; Nintendo, presumably, doesn’t want to worry about the hell that even an ounce of lag would inflict on its machine-precisioned platforming. Instead, the game utilizes a bizarre system that syncs your game up with that of other players tackling the same level as you at the same time, projecting their ghostly appearances into your level, and letting them drop little cardboard “standees” that other players can see.

At first, the effect is distracting, bordering on irritating. Wonder is an absolutely gorgeous game, and having its bright, vibrant levels populate themselves with internet ghosts bouncing all over the place, literally littering across the beautiful landscapes, is semi-sacrilegious. After a while, though, you begin to realize how the online system interacts with how the game handles death and failures, and the method to the madness emerges. See, in regular multiplayer, a dead Luigi (or whoever) can touch another player to instantly be revived without spending a life. If you’re alone (but online), that duty is meted out to the ghosts on your team instead—or their standees, either of which will bring you back to life with a touch if you can get to them in the narrow window before your clock to mortality ticks down.

The bizarre upshot to this is to create moments of genuine, unexpected camaraderie. You’ll be halfway through a tricky platforming section—Wonder’s levels are short enough that it doesn’t mind getting pretty rough with players from time to time—when the ghost of some online Peach will come tearing toward you, needing a last-second revival. You tag them, and somewhere else in the world, a player doesn’t have to restart the level. Maybe the two of you keep pace with each other for a bit, trading revives, and suddenly an unspoken agreement has formed—one player trying something tricky, while the other hangs back, giving little emojis of encouragement and waiting to provide the revival as needed. The sheer optionality of the whole system imbues these encounters with a weird sense of genuine warmth: there’s no reward for helping other players, beyond the possibility of good-natured reciprocation—and knowing that we’re all in this together.

(At the risk of “Guy who’s only seen Boss Baby is getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes”-ing the dynamic, it reminds us quite a bit of the feelings of pure niceness that can develop when you go online to help people beat levels or bosses in Dark Souls or Elden Ring; those games give rewards for cooperation, but often the biggest one is the knowledge that you got someone, somewhere, through a fight that was making them pull their hair out. The fact that Nintendo put some levels in Wonder where you’re directly encouraged to leave standees to point other players toward secrets only enhances the parallels. It’s too bad you can’t leave a sign calling one of the game’s numerous turtles a dog.)

Anyway, this multiplayer system is by no means the main focus of Wonder, which, again, is an exceptional game even if you’re playing it strictly in a vacuum. But it’s another example of the weird, out-there ways Nintendo approaches its online multiplayer—finding ever more ways to interact with your fellow gamers that have nothing to do with viewing them down the barrel of a digital weapon.