Seven Game Series Begging For The Super Mario Maker Treatment

Super Mario Maker captured the imaginations of Nintendo fans
at this year's E3.

The Nintendo World Championship 2015highlighted the insane
degree of entertainment and unpredictability a creative mind can pack into
custom stages. NWC 2015's final challenge was filled with surprising enemies
like jumbo chain chomps and triple Bowser attacks, along with treacherous
platforming sequences that puzzled the mind. After showcasing these
possibilities, Super Mario Maker has us wishing other long-running franchises would
receive the same treatment.

Editors note: This article was originally published August 11. Super Mario Maker is out, read our glowing review here.

For this list, we stuck to franchises with old-school roots
like Super Mario. The combination of visual and design simplicity, along with
players' familiarity with their respective games, make these franchises feel
like natural fits for the formula.

The Legend of Zelda
The Zelda franchise is a perfect place to let creative
players loose to craft their own dungeons and worlds. Of course, crafting your
own version of Hyrule is a taller order than placing some warp pipes and Hammer
Bros. in a Mario Maker stage. However, the screen-by-screen, room-by-room
structure of the classic entries feels like an approachable format for self-expression.
Battling a small army of Like-Likes only to find a chest filled with a single
rupee sounds devious, but Zelda fans have been training for a huge challenge
via decades of titles. Creators could also theoretically collaborate and stitch
their dungeons together, creating a co-opted overworld together. Even better,
players could swap between the visual style of The Legend of Zelda, A Link to
the Past, and A Link Between Worlds to spice things up.

Sonic the Hedgehog
The Sonic series has largely been a disappointment for well
over a decade. A Sonic Maker would be Sega's equivalent of tossing its
collective hands up in the air and exasperatedly saying "You do it." Given the
uniform look and style of the Genesis titles, players could weave together insane,
crazy-straw-inspired loop-the-loops or strategically position springs to send
Sonic hurtling into spike traps. Levels could also include hidden secrets like
bonus stages and extra lives only reachable with Tails' flying ability or
Knuckles' climbing claws. A nice addition would be the option to craft your own
boss battles with Dr. Robotnick, complete with custom weapons and basic A.I.
patterns. As long as every level ends with Sonic's fat foe fleeing in his
damaged Egg-o-matic, we're on board.

Mega Man
Let's go ahead and acknowledge that Mega Man Powered-Up for
the PSP was awesome. It allowed players to craft their own punishing Mega Man
stages using all the trappings of the original NES games, all wrapped up in a
cutesy art style. That was great, but we'd love to dive deeper into level-building
using the traditional 8- and 16-bit framework. Given the Mega Man series'
open-ended level select, bundling user-generated stages has the potential to come
together into pseudo-full games, including Robot Masters with weapon
vulnerabilities and item-gated secret rooms. Swapping between the classic 8-bit
and 16-bit styles would also open up the possibilities tremendously. Similar to
Super Mario Maker, being able to wall jump as X in a classic NES-style Mega Man
level would be a unique experience for fans. Allow players to select from the
dozens of Robot Masters and Mavericks to cap off levels, and you've got a huge
number of possibilities that should fill the gap in the neglected hearts of
Mega Man fans everywhere.

Castlevania
You don't need to be a gothic architect to understand what
makes Dracula's castle so cool. You need a zombie-infested entryway, a perilous
clock tower, some flooded sections swarming with mermen, and a handful of other
sections to populate with every monster from history. Users could also stack
their sections of the castle together like building blocks, allowing the
Castlevania Maker to meld the levels into a larger castle map to give players a
sense of place. The series has an entire bestiary's worth of difficult bosses,
from raging minotaurs to gigantic spheres composed of dead corpses, which could
allow players to surprise intrepid vampire hunters with a slew of final
encounters. Maybe Frankenstein's Monster could've overthrown Dracula and he's
the lord of the manor this time around. The 2D Castlevania series doesn't have
a particularly varied visual style, but being able to swap between the classic
8-bit look of Simon Belmont's iconic adventure and the enhanced 16-bit
aesthetic of Symphony of the Night would be more than enough for most fans.

Up next: Creating our own retro JRPGs and more...