Designer Behind Award-Winning Baby Steps Says Souring Opinions On Mario Sunshine Are Where ‘Things Went Wrong For 3D Games’

Bennett Foddy, the independent game designer behind QWOP and Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy and one of the masterminds behind Baby Steps, is known for making notoriously tricky games with wonky movement, but overall uplifting vibes. So I probably shouldn’t be surprised that when I asked him to talk to me about a game that had inspired his work for a new article series I’m trying to spin up, he came to me with Super Mario Sunshine.

Confession: I am also a Super Mario Sunshine lover. It is actually, for real, probably my favorite Mario game, and it certainly is Foddy’s. Hearing Foddy name Sunshine in response to this pitch immediately invoked both childhood and recent adulthood memories of bouncing around Delfino Plaza: spraying water, scooting around on the ground, spinning through the air, bounding off the heads of angry Piantas. Every time I play it, I can’t help but run, scoot, and leap around even when I don’t actually need to, just for the sheer joy of it.

I also unironically like the notorious Sand Bird level, which perhaps explains why I spent something like 10-15 hours of my life climbing the Manbreaker in Baby Steps last year, all so I wouldn’t have to call another man “Lord.” Yeah, the developer behind stuff like this is definitely a Mario Sunshine guy.

Foddy first encountered Super Mario Sunshine in 2002, after it came out in Australia. Consoles are expensive there, he says, so he didn’t have a GameCube at the time. But a friend of his did, and when he saw Super Mario Sunshine, he went straight to the store and bought both the console and the game. “It was one of those moments, I can say there’s only been two of them in my adult life, where I saw it and I was like, I have to have that,” he says.

Due to the aforementioned expense of consoles, Foddy (who was in his 20s at the time) was a PC gamer “through and through,” though he’d played most of the major Mario games prior to Sunshine and enjoyed them. He also loved platformers, specifically citing Prince of Persia as a favorite. But it wasn’t the platforming, or the Mario of Super Mario Sunshine that drew him. It was the heat.

“It was about the sense of hotness coming off the screen,” he says. “I’m from Australia. So we’d go to the beach in the summertime. But I loved the tropics. I got to go to Indonesia once, to Hawaii once as a kid, to the Australian tropics a couple of times. And it was really for me the dream of a good vacation. And I’d never felt that in a video game. You had a little inkling of it in The Secret of Monkey Island. There’s a couple of Leisure Suit Larry games that take place in the tropics. I feel like they just really observed tropical heat.

“There’s a way that when you’re in the tropics, it rains a lot, right? There’s always really big towering clouds. And it can go from really bright to really dark multiple times over the course of a day. And you get really wet when it rains. And then you dry super fast because the sun is hot. And it feels like everything has this feeling of just being roasted and you don’t get that in the kind of dry heat that we had in the south of Australia. So I just felt that.”

At the time, Foddy wasn’t a game designer. He was “working toward being a philosopher” and was in a band, he says. So he didn’t know how Nintendo had made Super Mario Sunshine’s heat so compelling to him. Now, of course, he can tell me. “They put a lot of this heat haze, right? They put a lot of blue in the shadows, created the sense of there being a heavy atmosphere everywhere. The whole game is darkened, right? Like that’s really important? Because it gets brighter as you play. But you sort of see on the horizon this kind of heavy cloud. And the idea is that it’s pollution. But it also just feels observed.

“And then the other thing is that they put water everywhere in the game. There’s fountains, right? There’s canals. You can spray water on the ground and slip and slide. Like there’s just something about that summer use of water. There’s sprinklers, water balloons or whatever. Like everything that we associate with playing with water and having water around in the summer, in the heat, is represented in some way. And so the coolness of the water creates space for you to actually feel the hotness of the sun, which is just absent in most video games. A lot of games go for this. But they don’t really get it.”

Foddy comes back to the water aesthetics a lot during our conversation, giving us both space to gush about how stylish the water looks. He thinks the water in Super Mario Sunshine still looks good even by today’s standards because it’s not intended to be realistic, but to invoke a feeling. It “looks how it wants to look.”

“Water is so hard to get right…And lots of different types of water as well, right? There’s a sort of sense of, like the shallow water and the canals and lakes feel different from the sea and all of these things. And it’s tough to do that on a weak console because water is tough to render. It requires you to draw everything that’s inside it and to draw the water itself and to do stuff to the pixels. Like, that’s heavy processing. So, it’s really, you know, it’s a testament to their technical artists.

“I’ve done my share of technical art working on Baby Steps over the last five or six years. And I have new appreciation for those folks who are, you know, especially on the weak hardware of the day. The fact that there isn’t really water in games that looks better than that now from a kind of artistic point of view, sure, there’s water that looks more realistic. But there’s nobody really working with it to get that sort of sense of it, that sort of tactile, textural sense of wetness and of waterness and of refreshingness and all of that stuff that we get when we look at water. It’s just hard to do, right? That takes real inspiration, I think.”

It’s not just the vibes. Foddy also loves the mechanics, and the way players can combine different elements of the game’s mechanics to do interesting things, what he calls “combinatorics.”

“I was just remembering how when you are doing the spraying water mechanic, and it comes out strong to let you know that you’re running out of your charge. It starts to spray around all over the place. It’s kind of a way that is like… It’s hard to think of it as anything other than kind of urinary. It just seems like there’s so many little ideas like that in the mechanics. And they’re kind of inspired from life. And they’re complicated in a way that provides combinatorics. For example, that you can spray the ground. And the ground becomes slick. And then you can slide along on your tummy. You can kind of flip out of that into a jump. That’s the way that you go fastest, right?” 

Perhaps controversially, Foddy loves FLUDD, the combo water gun/jetpack that Mario totes around with him most of the game. His least favorite levels are the ones in which it’s taken away. He says he thinks the movement flexibility offered by FLUDD turned out to be a significant inspiration for his own games that also play with movement.

“In Mario Sunshine, there’s always like 50 different ways you can do something…That’s an aspect that I hope is reflected in my own work. I think in Getting Over It and Baby Steps, there’s a sense of flexibility in how you’re playing it. And you can learn to play it in different ways and different situations. There are a lot of different solutions to everything. Nothing is too tight or too inflexible. Everything is kind of like a little bit expressive. A little bit open to being played in different ways. Not to say that Mario Sunshine is easy. I don’t think Getting Over It or Baby Steps are easy. But they afford you a lot of different ways to play them.”

In fact, he cites Sunshine as an orientation for him in interesting traversal. He says his work is more focused than Sunshine because he’s indie and he naturally can’t make games as large and varied as Nintendo can, but he thinks Sunshine inspired him to start thinking about a sort of fuzziness in movement, as opposed to precision platforming. While he loves games with tight movement too, he says his work plays more with movement that’s “softer,” “a little bit more liminal” and “a bit less certain,” just like Sunshine’s.

“Gabe Cuzillo, who is part of the Baby Steps team as well, just gave a talk at GDC, which is about how in the level design of Baby Steps, we were trying to zero in on what’s in between the clearly possible and the clearly impossible. We wanted stuff that was kind of plausibly possible, which is unorthodox, right? The kind of, I think, Nintendo-informed orthodoxy for how we do difficulty in games, especially in level design, is to make it clear what’s possible and what’s impossible. And they have really zeroed in on that in Mario and in Zelda, a little bit less in the physics in Zelda. But Sunshine’s not really like this. There’s always a sense of like, ah, just think about if I had just activated the jetpack a millisecond before, then I might have been able to get over that jump. It’s very, very low clarity on what’s possible and impossible. It’s that aspect of the game that is informing my work and I think our collective work now.”

But the thing that made the biggest impression on Foddy wasn’t the vibes, or the movement, or FLUDD. It was instead a weird Easter egg model of a book hidden in Noki Bay whose purpose no one has ever been able to determine:

“It’s rare in video games, especially games made by big teams on a tight deadline with a lot of pressure, that you feel joy in making coming through. And in that book thing, that’s somebody… I just cannot help but imagine people laughing in the studio as I see them putting that book in there, knowing nobody… People will wonder about this, right? Like people will be talking about this for decades. That’s a thing that you do out of joy, and I think that joy echoes through the game in a way that’s not always there for marquee titles in big franchises that are used to sell consoles. There’s too much pressure, right? There’s too many people, usually. It’s too constrained. And [the Sunshine developers] were given a little bit of freedom to do this stuff. 

“I contributed to a couple of Easter eggs in Just Cause 4. Because I lived nearby the offices, and I knew some of the folks who were working on that. And, you know, that game, those games with Just Cause 3 and 4 have a joy that comes through as well that was there in the studio. But even then, if they wanted to put an Easter egg in, they had to apply for permission from the parent company. Because you’re spending money, right? It makes sense. You’re spending company money to do this stuff. But that process, it’s like a narrow bottleneck for the joy to escape out of, if you see what I mean.

“Sunshine is so full of little gags like that, little observations, little jokes, little ideas. Like I said, with the spraying of the spray nozzle or that thing where you’re riding on your tummy or how Yoshi reacts if he eats a chili…All those little things. I don’t know. I feel like they were just given freedom and it seems like they were happy. I could just be making this up. It could be there was a miserable death march and everybody was sad and couldn’t wait to get to the next thing. I doubt it. I just think that what’s coming through with that game and kind of drips out of it is confidence and joy. It’s just rare.”

Super Mario Sunshine initially launched to near-universal critical acclaim. It received some criticism at the time for its wonky camera system, difficulty, and FLUDD, which some felt was a detriment to the platforming. In the years since Sunshine’s launch, those criticisms have only grown stronger and stronger. Super Mario Sunshine has, over time, easily become the least popular of the 3D Mario games, particularly with its re-release as a part of Super Mario 3D All-Stars in 2020. You can Google “Super Mario Sunshine bad” and immediately be fludd-ed with articles, videos, Reddit posts, and other discussions going back over a decade canvassing the reasons why people no longer look at it with the same sunny disposition they once did.

Foddy says the fault for that reputation lies not with Super Mario Sunshine, but with all of us, the Mario fans and the media. “I don’t think it’s a big exaggeration to say that it was in the reception to Mario Sunshine, the best Mario game by a long way in my opinion, that things went wrong for 3D games, for the Mario series, for AAA in general.

“I think what happened was they took a big bet with Mario Sunshine. I think they felt like they were on fire probably over Nintendo EAD because Mario 64 had been so influential and so great. And it gave them confidence to take a big swing and do something that was a little bit bold, a little bit new. Like, let’s try and do something new with this. Let’s try and push Mario off in a new direction and make a new kind of game. And everyone was like, ah, the jetpack is annoying. And the camera gets stuck sometimes. There are low-resolution textures. And I don’t know what happened over at Nintendo. All I can say is that what we got next were two games that were very similar in style to Mario 64 and then another one that was similar to Mario 64, some games that were similar to Super Mario World. And they’re stuck now. They’re confined, I think, by fan expectations.”

Foddy’s perspective here helps me make sense of his answer to my last question, which was, if he could make Super Mario Sunshine in 2026 for the first time, what would he do? Apart from cleaning up the camera controls, he wouldn’t change a thing. But he also thinks that just remaking Mario Sunshine again and again is antithetical to the reasons why he loves it in the first place. What he thinks it should inspire is more risks.

“What’s called for is games that are new and different and inspired by the boldness and the experimental approach and the joy and the confidence of that game,” he says. “And they won’t look anything like Mario Sunshine, right? They’ll look like something totally different. Part of it is as players and as critics—I think people do now understand more so now—We need to understand that with that joy and with that confidence, there are going to be elements that are annoying, right? It’s to understand that a little bit of annoyance is not a ding on a game. In fact, it might just be the sort of like the salt or the bitters that makes it even better.”