‘Super Mario Maker’ And the User-Generated Content Playground | Inverse
By far the greatest gift the internet has given our species is collaboration. Sharing work over thousands of miles away has made our big world just a wee bit smaller and intimate.
Video games have evolved with sandbox creation tools faster than any other form of entertainment. Players were modding Doom way before YouTube and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s collaborative filmmaking platform hitRECord. But Super Mario Maker, which comes as a ready-to-tinker toolbox, seems exactly what we have been getting to all along.
It began with modding PC games in the early ‘90s, a hobby equal to automotive geeks tricking out their cars but way dorkier, and continues to thrive today. Entirely new games like Team Fortress were crafted from ripping apart Quake — like making Eve out of Adam’s rib (that shit’s sexist, btw). In recent years, dozens of games have included robust creation spaces within the games themselves.