Mario originally fired bullets, no really

Shigeru Miyamoto reveals Mario originally fired bullets, rather than fireballs

The Mario 25th Anniversary celebrations continue, this time with an interview with none other than Shigeru Miyamoto in the latest Famitsu. In this interview, Miyamoto reveals that during much of the development of Super Mario Bros., Mario fired bullets. The controls for the game were vastly different too with A for shooting these bullets, B to dash and up on the D-Pad to jump. How weird would have that been?

However, it wasn’t to be. "The bullets wound up becoming fireballs later — we originally thought about having a shoot-’em-up stage where Mario jumps on a cloud and shoots at enemies, but we dropped it because we wanted to focus on jumping action." This shoot-’em-up mode lives on though, sort of. "The sky-based bonus stages are the remnants of that idea. In the end, we realized that being able to shoot all the fireballs you want while running gave Mario too much of an advantage, so instead we had it so you shoot only one fireball when you start running. That freed up the A button, and we made that the jump button. I really wanted to have A be the action button and make you press up to jump, but it definitely worked out better for Mario in the end."

At this point though Miyamoto has said so many off-the-wall things about the history of Mario, he could just be pulling our leg at this point. Though as crazy as it sounds, we of course believe him.

Source: Kotaku