‘Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games’ Brings Retro Goodness To Switch

Nintendo and Sega have just released a trailer for “Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020” showing that it’s fun, charming, and hilarious. What’s more, it brings retro gaming goodness to today’s Nintendo portable, the Switch.

Sega recently unveiled the new “Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020” game via a trailer shown during Gamescom this year. The one-minute trailer showed familiar and iconic Nintendo and Sega characters competing against each other -- in their full retro glory.

In 2D?

“Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020” features both 3D and 2D events that players can enjoy. There are a total of 21 events in 3D, and 10 events in 2D, Polygon reported.

The sports-oriented game’s 2D events take players back in time to the 1964 Summer Olympics in Japan. Players can choose from 10 available 2D events, namely the 100-meter dash, 400-meter hurdles, vault (gymnastics), 1000-meter kayak single, 10-meter platform diving event, long jump, marathon, trap shooting, volleyball, and judo.

What’s interesting here is that the game developers chose to make the 1964 events feel as close as it can to that era using 2D backgrounds and 8-bit and 16-bit sprites.

Each character is designed to look like his/her original sprite. Mario, Peach, Luigi and the gang all come in the same 8-bit sprites when “Super Mario Bros.” was first released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Sonic, Tails, Eggman and the others, on the other hand, come as the 16-bit sprite they used to be when the first game “Sonic the Hedgehog” was released for the Sega Genesis in 1991.

The trailer, shown below, shows just how cute and charming the 2D graphics look like:

YouTubers who watched the trailer saw a lot of funny and interesting things worth noting. Here are some of them:

• The sprites aren’t altered. Peach, who is in her original 8-bit form, doesn’t have any additional animations at all. She “only has a single frame that moves.” One YouTuber noted how “she's literally just a png moving across the screen.”
• Creative reuse of animations. Some 8-bit characters, like Mario and Luigi, use old poses in totally new ways. Luigi’s flips, for example, use the same pose he makes when climbing vines in “Super Mario Bros.”

“Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020” will be released Nov. 5 this year exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.