Nintendo Really Didn’t Want Us to Know Who Developed the Super Mario RPG Remake

The remake of Super Mario RPG is out today, and good news! It’s a great game! We reviewed it, saying that the game is “considered a classic for a reason, and this wonderfully faithful remake makes it easy for anyone who missed it in the SNES era to see why.” While some outlets disagreed with us, the vast majority of critics seem to like it a lot.

So given that it’s a great remake of a classic game with seemingly no whiff of controversy or problems around it, there’s absolutely no reason for its publisher, Nintendo, to be weird or cagey about who actually made it, right?

Wrong! Nintendo has been being very weird about disclosing seemingly basic information about who developed the Super Mario RPG Remake for months now, and there’s no clear reason why.

Who devved it?

Here’s what happened. Super Mario RPG’s remake was announced at a Nintendo Direct earlier this year. In the initial announcement trailer, there was no indication of who the development studio was – just a copyright notice indicating the property was owned by Nintendo and Square Enix. This in itself wasn’t unusual, as plenty of trailers like it, especially in Nintendo Directs, don’t include this information. The official Nintendo store page for the game pointed to Nintendo as the publisher, but again, those pages don’t list developers. Not a huge deal.

What’s weird though is the goofy, cagey way Nintendo chose to handle this information as we inched closer and closer to launch. A few weeks ago, I saw several threads of online speculation of who the studio was – could it be Grezzo? Camelot? A group of rehired AlphaDream developers? No one seemed to know. So I did the fairly obvious thing a journalist does in this situation and reached out to Nintendo and Square Enix to find out the answer. It would have been extremely simple for either of them to just respond to my email and say, “Hey yeah thanks for asking, it was a joint effort between Nintendo internal studios and ArtePiazza.” Simple. No problem. Clears it right up.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Square Enix told me to ask Nintendo, and Nintendo said to wait until the game is out and check the credits. Notably, while IGN had the game for review, all this information was locked behind those credits – there was no ArtePiazza logo on a splash screen when you booted the game up, nothing. The general public only found out because someone managed to find it written in very tiny letters in a copyright notice at the bottom of a Japanese pre-order download page. Barring that, an embargo on discussing the game’s credits would have prevented anyone reviewing the game from listing the literal co-creator of this game anywhere in their reviews.

Art in the Piazza

So, I don’t know, here’s the information Nintendo was so secretive about, I guess! Super Mario RPG Remake was directed by Ayako Moriwaki, who was also an assistant director on Pikmin 4 and worked on level design for Yoshi’s Crafted World. Art direction came from Shintaro Majima over at ArtePiazza, who was also art director for the Romancing SaGa 3 remaster and Dragon Quest Builders, among many other things. Nintendo’s Taro Kudo was the event director after holding the same role on Paper Mario: The Origami King. I won’t read you the entire credits, but overall project leadership appeared to be a joint effort between Nintendo and ArtePiazza, collaborating with Digital Media Lab for cutscenes, Basiscape for sound design, and Nintendo Pictures for character art. Yoko Shimomura returned to reimagine the soundtrack.

The most interesting bit of it is the involvement of ArtePiazza, a long-standing Japanese studio with a reputation for making pretty good Dragon Quest remakes and ports. Had we learned this months ago, we all just would have gone, “Oh cool, ArtePiazza!” and moved on with our lives. I don’t think there’s any secret scandal here revolving around ArtePiazza. It’s just so bizarre that a piece of information that’s normally a staple of press releases, fact sheets, official websites, trailers, and copyright pages was so well and deliberately hidden.

This weird secrecy fits into a longer, ongoing pattern that Nintendo has been embracing lately of being weirdly cagey about simple, inoffensive information, such as who the voice of Mario is, and being increasingly harsh about what kinds of information it will and won’t let early reviewers share with their audiences. Heck, we’ve held back multiple recent Pokemon reviews because of Nintendo’s strict information controls, such as not allowing us to talk about the literal opening cutscene of Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Why? Who does this benefit?

Nintendo isn’t the only culprit of this, even if they are one of the most egregious. For instance, we barely know anything about how well Xbox’s business is doing because Microsoft won’t share more than a few vague comparables each quarter. And now that Activision-Blizzard is owned by it, all of that publisher’s data is likely disappearing into a black box too. And it was only due to poorly done redactions that we found out some basic information how much it costs Sony to make games earlier this year. Sure, the games industry has good reasons to be secretive about a number of things, but when you compare it to the film business or basically anything else, video games in particular seem a little out of control.

So congrats to ArtePiazza for co-developing what seems to be a pretty good remake of Super Mario RPG. It’s great to know who’s responsible for making the really cool art we all enjoy. In the future, it’s good to know that there are hundreds of clever internet sleuths who can often track down this kind of really basic information when major companies seem uninterested in sharing it. But wouldn’t it be great if they’d just tell us these things up front to begin with?

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].