LMAO!
Even less well known, a title developed by Novalogic called “Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds” for the CD-i, which was never fully developed, a lost Mario game. Programmer on the project, Silas Warner comments “Novalogic was seeking work from Nintendo, we had already produced one Nintendo cartridge. A Nintendo sales executive came up with the idea that maybe simple Nintendo titles could play on the CD-i. I suspect he was thinking of some kind of adapter to plug a Nintendo cartridge into a CD slot! But it set off a frantic race at Novalogic. The project was to put a popular Nintendo game, Super Mario World onto a CD-i disk.”
It’s clear that Nintendo instigated the project although probably didn’t have Miyamoto’s Mario in mind as a possible conversion. Nevertheless the results of Novalogic’s development team was impressive. The simple gameplay mechanics stay faithful to the original SMW, with no obvious differences in an early prototype version of SMWW. Nina Stanley, lead artist on the project comments, “It was intended to be part of the Mario series, and as far as I was aware, a sequel or follow up to SMW. It needed to be as much like Mario on the SNES as far as handling and game mechanics.”