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We imagine that most of you here will have heard of a little game called Super Mario Bros., right? But how many of you have thought about how strange the big showdowns with Bowser are? As far as 'boss battles' are concerned, there's very little... battling. Well, in a recent press conference celebrating his Order of Culture award, Shigeru Miyamoto explained the thought process behind the game's jump-based finales.
"The most intriguing aspect of Super Mario, is that Mario doesn’t actually fight Bowser," Miyamoto told press at the conference (translated by Nintendo Everything), "Normally, if there’s a boss at the end, you have to fight him, right? But creating a battle is difficult, and we were really struggling with how to do it."
Miyamoto pointed to the likes of Pac-Man clearing the screen of pellets or completing rows in Tetris as prime examples of a satisfying conclusion to those game systems. For Mario, a game all about running and jumping, finishing on a fight simply wouldn't feel right.
"When I thought, ‘I can’t create a battle like this,’ I realised that since it’s a game where you keep running to the right, how about making it so that the person who reaches the far right wins?," Miyamoto continued. "Then I had a brilliant idea: ‘Why not just jump over the opponent instead of fighting?’"
And so we hit the iconic finale that we all know so well. "I found it surprisingly fun when I tried it," Miyamoto said of the simplicity of the solution, "and I was really happy when I realised that".
Naturally, Mario and Bowser's encounters would go on to be far more action-filled in later entries — it's quite the progression from hurdling the big bad in the first game to chucking him off a platform in Super Mario 64 — but it goes to show how some good old Nintendo creativity ended up being one of the most iconic moments in gaming.