WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!
Over 210 "microgames," each short enough to finish in seconds, fired at you faster and faster until your four lives ran out. That was WarioWare on the Game Boy Advance in 2003, and the Japanese box printed the pitch bigger than the logo: "More! Shorter! Faster!"
The idea came from Mario Artist: Polygon Studio, a 64DD program whose "Sound Bomber" mode strung together rapid micro-challenges; Hirofumi Matsuoka directed both. A group of developers at Nintendo R&D1 started building the game in secret, without telling their manager, and recycled music, sound effects and Wario's voice clips from Wario Land 4. Wario got the job because nobody else fit; as Yoshio Sakamoto put it, he "is always doing stupid things and is really idiotic."
Microgame ideas went on post-it notes stuck to the director's table, and people from elsewhere in the department started sticking up their own. Anything too obscene or "too Japanese" was cut so anyone could understand it, and because individual programmers coded individual microgames, each one looks different from the last. The finished game held more than 210 of them across nine stages hosted by Wario and his friends, with themes like sports, nature and old Nintendo games, among them 9-Volt's stage with a Legend of Zelda microgame in it. Fail and you lose one of four lives; survive and the game speeds up until a longer boss stage breaks the run. Bonus games hid in the margins, including Pyoro and Paper Plane. Shigeru Miyamoto took the marketing seriously, approving the slogan Saita Saitan Saisoku, "More! Shorter! Faster!," which dominated the Japanese box; the Western box showed the cast instead.
It shipped in Japan in March 2003 as Made in Wario and in North America that May. GameSpot gave it an Editor's Choice award and a nomination for the most innovative game of 2003, with Jeff Gerstmann's 9.1 praising something you could play in short bursts and keep coming back to; IGN's Craig Harris gave it a 9.0. It won the Edge Award at the 2004 Edinburgh International Games Festival, and Edge later placed it 40th among the 100 best games to play today, calling almost every microgame "a masterclass in how to instantly captivate."
A GameCube remake, Mega Party Games!, turned the same microgames into a two-to-four-player party, and the formula has carried every WarioWare since except Game & Wario. Pyoro and Paper Plane grew into the DSiWare games Bird & Beans and Paper Airplane Chase, and the original came back through the 3DS Ambassador Program in 2011, the Wii U Virtual Console in 2014 and Nintendo Classics in 2023.
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