Braid Would Have Featured Remakes of Old Games, Says Creator

Everybody loves a good platformer, whether you are jumping around on ledges trying to navigate your way onto the top of something or jumping down on enemies as made famous by the Mario franchise from Nintendo.

Independent game developer Jonathan Blow counted on such a thing when he created Braid, a platformer much like in the spirit of Mario but with an interesting tweak added, namely that you could reverse time and use other time manipulating objects in order to traverse the levels and uncover the deep and intricate story of the main protagonist, Tim.

But while Braid was hailed as a great tribute to Mario, Blow has recently revealed that in the initial stages of development he planned to have secret levels filled with remakes of old classics and even managed to create a time-manipulating version of Mountain King in the game. Sadly though, the ideas never really matched what Braid was becoming and Blow was forced to scrap them.

“I often get the idea to remake old games, though I usually don’t do it,” said Blow. “Actually, though, one of the earlier ideas I was playing with in Braid was that there would be secret levels with remakes of classic games, modified with the time rules of each particular world, accessible when you finished each puzzle. I had an entire remake of Mountain King in Braid at one point. I think it was better than the original Mountain King, with more-sophisticated gameplay, but it didn’t fit what Braid was becoming, so I eventually took it out.”

Adding time manipulation to almost every platformer seems like a pretty interesting idea, especially since it would immediately fix any wrong steps or jumps made by the player without forcing him to revert back to the nearest checkpoint and lose a life.