WarioWare's inception began during the development of
Mario Artist: Polygon Studio, a successor to
Mario Paint being developed for the
Nintendo 64DD; a game where players could create and animate fully polygonal three-dimensional models. A feature of
Polygon Studio was a mode called "Sound Bomber", where the player completes rapid consecutive "microgames". This concept would be reused and fleshed out for the first
WarioWare title. In addition, many of the minigames in
Polygon Studio bear heavy resemblance to some microgames found in
Mega Microgames!. The development team used
post-it notes in order to come up with microgame ideas; whenever someone had an idea for a microgame, they would write it down on a note and stick it to the director's table. The game became well known around the department, as other members not actively working on the game contributed ideas of their own in the hopes that the development team would be receptive. Microgames that were too obscene or "too Japanese" were cut to make sure all people playing could understand the game. As individual programmers coded individual microgames, each microgame has a vastly different visual style.
Made in Wario, as the game is known in Japan, was originally made secretly by a number of developers on the development team
Nintendo R&D1 without telling their manager at the time. The people came up with the idea of using Wario as its mascot since they could not think of anyone else who would best be suited for the game. According to
Yoshio Sakamoto, Wario was chosen as the game's protagonist as he "is always doing stupid things and is really idiotic".
Shigeru Miyamoto put a lot of thought into how best to market the game. He wanted to show how its unusual playing style made it distinct from other games, in the way it could be simply picked up and enjoyed. Miyamoto gave the staff the approval to use the slogan "More! Shorter! Faster!" (最多 最短 最速
Saita Saitan Saisoku), which prominently appeared on the Japanese box art, surpassing the actual game logo in terms of size. It was not used for Western packaging, which instead depicted the
WarioWare cast rather than just a portion of Wario's face as seen on the Japanese counterpart. == Reception ==