Current Events > Why did nintendo stop doing 2nd quests for mario/zelda games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think the only mario games that had a 2nd quest were 1 and 2 (Japan's 2. "Lost Levels" as its known in the west)

Zelda has been sporadic on it. I'm not as familiar with that series as mario though. So some games might have 2md quests that I am not aware of. But would it have been so hard to keep this up for every main zelda and mario game? Imagine mario 64 having a 2nd quest that opens up when you finish, with remixed levels

It was a cheap way to make the game seem bigger than it was. When they had the space to make games as long as they wanted, there was less incentive to include it.

It originates from the old arcade days, complete the game to play a slightly harder version of it.
In Zeldas case, they discovered that they had only used half of the memory dedicated to maps, so they decided to make twice as many for a second quest.

The increased scope of modern games means that remixing them is a considerably more resource intensive process. And I'd wager that the percentage of players who actually did second quests is probably really small.