I ate up every minute of Pandemic Studios’ original Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, simply because it satisfied my long-held desire to blow anything — and everything — to smithereens. And in an interview with Next Generation, Pandemic’s Cameron Brown reveals that was his exact goal from the very beginning. But his inspiration didn’t come from Halliburton or Blackwater, but rather a plumber named Mario:
“In my mind—and I don’t for a moment say this to suggest that we should be considered on a level with these great games of the past—but I see from my own pace as a gamer and my own development as a game designer a connection to some really classic games, specifically Super Mario World, which had a defined rule set for everything; everything just works in a certain way. You know a green shell is always a green shell and a green shell doesn’t work in any other way, and so it’s up to the player then to use that tool, like when you’re solving the little puzzles in different areas and you’re like, ‘Oh, a green shell does this, so maybe if I use a green shell here it will bounce off this and it will hit that guy and I can do something cool.’
“That’s a tenuous connection, I admit, but that got me thinking about the idea of gameplay axioms; this idea that the player would understand, ‘Alright, I call in an air strike, it always does this, there’s never an exception.’
That’s all well and good, but Miyamoto inspires everyone. Let’s see creativity swim upstream for once; I’m aching for some good ol’ nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in my Mario Kart.
You can read more about the challenges of building open-world gameplay and fully destructible environments at Next Generation.
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