Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
1992 · Platformer · Game Boy
Overview
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is a platformer in which Mario reclaims his castle from the scheming Wario by collecting six golden coins from themed worlds, featuring the Bunny Ears and Carrot power-up that gives Mario slow-falling and high-jumping abilities. The game introduced Wario as a major Nintendo character and featured the largest overworld map of any Mario game to that point.
Deep Dive
Super Mario Land 2 was a massive improvement over its predecessor in every dimension — larger sprites, more expressive character animation, a full world map allowing nonlinear zone selection, and power-ups specific to the game including the Bunny Ears (slow descent when jump is held) and Fire Mario. Mario's castle had been taken over by Wario during his long absence, and each of the six themed worlds — Space, the Pumpkin Zone, the Macro Zone, the Turtle Zone, the Hippo Zone, and the Tree Zone — contained one golden coin in a boss room. The nonlinear world map allowed players to approach zones in any order and explore optional stages branching from main paths. The map itself was an achievement of Game Boy design — Mario's castle at the center surrounded by themed regions, with visual design that communicated each zone's character immediately. The scale of each level was substantially larger than Super Mario Land, with more enemy variety, more elaborate platform arrangements, and longer stage lengths that justified the handheld format's extended play potential. Super Mario Land 2 was commercially enormous — selling over 11 million copies globally — and critically celebrated as one of the Game Boy's definitive titles. The introduction of Wario proved to be the game's most lasting contribution: the antagonist was popular enough to receive his own franchise, the Wario Land series, beginning in 1994.
Developer Story
Super Mario Land 2 was developed by Nintendo R&D1 under director Hiroji Kiyotake, who had served as a designer on the original Super Mario Land. Kiyotake's mandate was to create a Game Boy Mario game that felt like a complete Mario experience rather than a portable compromise, and the larger sprites, world map, and nonlinear stage selection were his direct responses to criticism of the original game's brevity and simplicity. The decision to introduce an antagonist — Wario — as a structural framing device reflected Kiyotake's belief that Mario games benefited from having a personality in the villain role rather than an abstract threat, and Wario's immediate popularity confirmed that judgment.
Did You Know?
- Wario made his first appearance in Super Mario Land 2, designed by Hiroji Kiyotake as a dark mirror of Mario — fat where Mario is stocky, greedy where Mario is heroic, occupying Mario's own castle as a statement of territorial usurpation.
- The game sold over 11 million copies globally on Game Boy, making it one of the handheld's best-selling non-pack-in titles and demonstrating that the platform could support full-featured Mario games rather than diminished versions of console releases.
- Super Mario Land 2 features a Space Zone — levels set in outer space with low gravity mechanics — that had no equivalent in any contemporary Mario game on console hardware, demonstrating that the Game Boy development team had freedom to innovate beyond the console team's design canon.
- The game's Bunny Mario transformation was popular enough in Japan to be featured in the anime adaptation of the series, appearing in several episodes of the Super Mario World cartoon before the character became primarily associated with Wario's subsequent franchise.
