I've been neglecting my blog again… which is always a sure sign that I'm in a creative slump. If I'm not writing blog-posts, I'm also not working on other projects. Which annoys me. Because I always have stuff that I want to be doing, and if I can't kick myself in the backside and make it happen, I get grumpy.
There's a bunch of stuff I want to do right here on this blog apart from my work on game publications. I want to get back to writing a series that details my campaign-creation process, something I've been meaning to do since 2017 (and I've only recently started putting something like it up on Reddit—more on this at a later date). I want to get back to my "Retro Rundown" series where I do in-depth reviews of TSR's early D&D materials. And I want to start posting more D&D and AD&D content right here on this blog—I've only just started slapping together a variant thief that looks to the earliest prototypical versions of the class for its mechanical inspiration.
There are also my usual game updates: I've been running an online Engines & Empires campaign for several months now based on the Lands of Älyewinn module that I'm putting together, and I've only lately started a Raiders of the Lost Artifacts campaign in-person with friends & family. The Raiders campaign is set in 1928 Romania and involves the player characters searching the infamous Palace of the Vampire Queen for pieces of an antediluvian artifact with eldritch powers, very Lovecraft-meets-Indiana-Jones. Always a fun time.
• • •
But tonight, I'm not going to write anything more about tabletop gaming. (I'll be back on that subject soon enough, I imagine). No, right now I want to touch upon another aspect of retro-gaming: 2D platforming. Specifically, Mario games. I've had Mario on the brain lately, and I've slowly been playing my way through the early entries in the series. Purely as a means of shaking the cobwebs loose and hopefully overcoming my writer's block, I though I might go through the games and offer a few brief thoughts on them. This'll be another "random pop culture" post, then, I suppose—purely for the sake of a writing exercise.
1981: Donkey Kong
The game that started it all: Mario's first appearance. Four stages of platforming mayhem, and a Mario who can't jump very high and who dies if he falls from any height. (An indication, if there ever was one, that this game takes place in a version of the "real" world with Earthly gravity and not whatever universe the Mushroom Kingdom exists in.) One could easily imagine this riff on
King Kong to take place in Mario's native Brooklyn, but in the days before Mario and Luigi went into business as plumbers—Mario is explicitly a carpenter and construction-worker in the lore around this game!
1982: Donkey Kong Jr.
The only direct sequel to
Donkey Kong that's actually any fun to play, it exhibits similar gravity to the original—namely, the titular protagonist, Donkey Kong Junior, cannot jump very high and is killed by even the slightest fall. The platforming is a mix of jumping and vine-climbing, and it's really enjoyable to play through this game's four stages, just like its predecessor. It's particularly satisfying to play through the fourth stage (the one with keys on dangling chains that unlock Donkey Kong's cage), where you can push two keys into place at once by rapidly scurrying up the right pairs of vines.
Apparently no longer a carpenter, Mario's short-lived career as a zookeeper clearly didn't work out.
1983: Mario Bros.
This year also saw the release of Donkey Kong 3, but I'm going to ignore that game because (a) it's no fun to play, (b) it doesn't involve Mario (instead it pits Donkey Kong against a new protagonist, an exterminator named "Stanley the Bugman"), and (c) by this time Mario has clearly moved on from carpentry and zookeeping to take up the profession he's known for, plumbing. This game is Luigi's debut, and it has the brothers clearing out a series of sewer-pipes that have been infested with monsters. Despite the appearance of giant deadly turtles, though, this game does not involve Boswer, Koopas, or the Mushroom Kingdom at all. The turtle enemies are Shellcreepers (not Koopa Troopas), but the fact that they're spilling out of warp-pipes — and the mysterious low gravity down in these sewers that allows the Bros. to jump super high and to drop without taking damage — suggests that maybe this game takes place somewhere "in between" the real world the Bros. hail from and the Mushroom World where they'll end up.
After all, apart from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show cartoon series (where the Bros. "found the secret warp zone while working on a drain"), the lore from Super Mario Bros. was always terribly vague on the story of how Mario and Luigi found their way into the Mushroom Kingdom and went on their quest to save the Princess. In at least one version of the story, they "heard the Princess's pleas for help echoing through the pipes" underneath their plumbing shop in Flatbush (a plot-device reused in the choose-your-own-adventure-esque "Nintendo Adventure Books"). In the awful anime, they travel not through pipes, but through a TV screen. In the NES instruction manual, Mario simply "hears of the Mushroom People's plight" and decides to help.
But it would seem that the Bros. don't wind up in the Mushroom Kingdom right away, because there's one more career change they need to go through first.
1984: Wrecking Crew
That's right, at least for a while between Mario and Luigi clearing out the New York sewers and their getting warped through a pipe into the Mushroom World, they were demolitionists. This game… actually isn't all that fun either. Mario and Luigi can't jump at all (ostensibly because they're lugging around huge sledgehammers), it's an arcade puzzle game where it's entirely possible to trap yourself in a corner or render a level unbeatable, and in the console version, a Mario doppelganger named "Foreman Spike" (who looks mysteriously like Wario, a character who wouldn't appear officially until 1992) is running around in the background screwing with you as you play. There's really not much to say about this game, and it's obscure for a reason.
1985: Super Mario Bros.
So this is where the Mario series finds its feet and sets the formula for everything that comes later. Running, jumping, stomping, brick-bashing, power-ups, fighting Goombas and Koopa Troopas, Mario and Luigi on their quest to save the "Mushroom Retainers" and Princess Toadstool from Bowser ("King of the Koopa")… it's all here. That
Movie Bob guy once remarked that (paraphrasing here, not quoting) "a story where a regular guy who gets transported to another world and saves a princess through the remarkable power of
jumping really high" is actually older than Mario, since it goes all the way back to John Carter of Mars… but this just may be the place where that story crystalizes into its most exquisitely polished form.
The only problem I have whenever I play through this game again is how sad I feel that Nintendo just can't seem to let this one go anymore. By rights, this should be the only game where you end a level by pulling down a flagpole. None of the other Mario games I'm going to comment on here work like that. But all four of the New Super Mario Bros. games, as well as Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World? Oh yeah, you bet they're just riffing on this one again. (And there were already no fewer than three other vintage games—Vs. Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. for Super Players a.k.a. The Lost Levels, and Super Mario Bros. Special—that were just this same game again but with different levels! Not sequels or remakes; just… expansion-packs!) Between those six most recent entries in the Mario platforming series and the three Super Mario Maker titles, it's clear that Nintendo would rather mine this game for all the nostalgia it's worth than to bother getting creative again with 2D Mario platforming. And that's a crying shame.
1988: Super Mario Bros. 2
You all know the story: Mario has a dream, goes through a door, and a voice begs him to save Subcon from the evil Wart. The next day, he goes on a picnic with Luigi, Toad, and the Princess, and they find the same door from Mario's dream in a cave! Also something, something,
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic.
Anyway, I love this game. I love it so much; it cannot be stressed how much I adore Super Mario Bros. 2. It's a breath of fresh air for its series, a trait that it shares with Zelda II and Castlevania II. It's just a joy to explore the stages of Subcon at a leisurely pace (the game has no timer), and you do need to explore: sometimes, finding your way through a stage is a small puzzle, but an eminently satisfying one when you do figure it out.
Whereas the movie adaption of SMB (which I appreciate far more nowadays than I did as a kid) had nothing whatsoever to do with this game (it sort of mixed up Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World, what with all the dinosaurs?), the Super Show cartoon series was a shameless mashup of this game and its predecessor, with the cartoon version of King Koopa being something of a mix of Bowser and Wart, and having both Koopa Troopas and Shyguys for his minions. (Along with other oddities: the cartoon ostensibly took place in a Mushroom Kingdom where warp-zones could be found in pipes, jars, stone eagle-heads, or red doors produced by throwing a magic potion; each discrete "world" that the Mario Bros. traveled through as they either chased or fled from King Koopa was its own dream-like parody of a real-world genre or movie; and, of course, both fire flowers and star-men turned Mario into a fireball-flinging Super Mario… who could sometimes fly. Cartoons; am I right?)
Child-me of course had no problem with reconciling the notion that the Mario Bros. were Brooklyn plumbers with the start of this game's backstory, where Mario and Luigi are apparently just hanging out in the Mushroom Kingdom like they live there. After all, with their quest to defeat Bowser over, why wouldn't they have a warp-pipe where they could travel between the real world and the Mushroom World whenever they wanted to? Exactly the way it worked in both the Nintendo Adventure Books and the Super Mario Bros. 3 cartoon series? Ponderings like this—working out the canon and the chronology for how the Mario series fit together—were of tremendous importance to me when I was a little kid. And I can't help but feel terribly sorry for any kids growing up now who feel the same way, since they have about a gazillion more Mario games to sort through than I ever did.
1989: Super Mario Land
This was actually the first Mario game that I ever owned a copy of. I played it to death as a kid. It's not very long. It has a weird story. (Sarasaland? Tatanga? Princess Daisy?) It plays a lot like the first Super Mario Bros. but with looser controls and two shoot-'em-up levels. Not much more to say about it, other than the fact that even though it's short, it still holds up as pretty fun to speed through.
1990: Super Mario Bros. 3
If the first SMB set the formula for Mario gameplay, this sequel—where Bowser and his seven kids, the Koopalings, try to take over the seven lands of the Mushroom World beyond the Mushroom Kingdom where the first game took place—sets the formula what the various stages of all the later Mario platformers would look like. This game introduced the world-map, the ubiquitous flight power-up (the Super Leaf remains a classic and has appeared in subsequent games, whereas the Cape Feather and the Bunny Carrot have not) and most importantly the "gimmick level"—where a level introduces some gimmick, teaches the player how to use or deal with it, and then varies the gameplay or escalates the difficulty as the level progresses. Every modern Mario platformer is basically rehashing this game and World (and World was arguably just a rehash of SMB3 with only a few innovations of its own, like secret stages).
You know what I want? Apart from a new Mario platformer where the sage doesn't end with SMB1's flagpole (or, hell, SMB2's eagle-head, or SML's tower, or SMB3's "course clear—you got a card!", or SMW's giant gate, or SML2's bell and door—something new for crying out loud!), I'd really, really like to see a new Mario platformer that bucked this old formula and came up with something truly new. Something more than each world being its own biome, and each stage being its own gimmick. That'd be something to see.
1991: Super Mario World
The fourth Super Mario Bros. is really just the third game all over again, but with dinosaurs, 16-bit graphics, and somewhat slipperier and floatier controls. In some ways, the gameplay is considerably more refined than SMB3 (for example, there's much more involved exploration in this game than in its predecessor), but in others it's a huge step back—the debut version of the spin-jump just makes this game far, far too easy to play through. The challenge here is in discovering all of the secrets, rather than in the platforming itself. And on that account, it's little wonder that the NSBM series has primarily looked to SMB3 rather than World for its inspiration. Although I would like to see a game more like this one (just without the overpowered spin-jump) in the future.
Also, the cartoon was pretty awful. No wonder they ended the series after the cartoon adaptation of World. (Never mind the fact that the games following this one—like Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's Island, and Super Mario 64—all had stories that were entirely divorced from and often conflicted with the "Brooklyn plumber" lore underpinning the old Super Show.) The fact that the cartoon expanded on the meager story from the game's instruction booklet—that Mario, Luigi, and the Princess were on a vacation to Dinosaur Land when they ran afoul of Bowser and the Koopalings again—was all well and good; but where the hell was Toad through all of this?
Also: fuck Oogtar. Scrappy Doo is more tolerable than stupid Oogtar.
1992: Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins
This was, in my humble opinion, the last good Mario platformer. Like SML, this one is weird. It introduces Wario (and a bunch of really quirky enemies). It takes place on an island with a castle, both of which apparently belonged to Mario before Wario took them over. Where did Mario get the private island and the castle? From Princess Toadstool? From Princess Daisy? Who the hell knows? The game doesn't explain it; kid-me figured it had to be one of those two possibilities, because if the island and the castle weren't a reward for previous heroics, they made absolutely zero sense. Also, the absence of Luigi is keenly felt here: as an entry in some sort of Mario "canon," this game is a total aberration. Once again, to today's kids who care about this stuff and feel the need to piece it all together: poor you. For me (I was eight when this game came out), this was when I started to get the barest hint of an inking that maybe Nintendo just didn't give a shit about Mario having a continuity.
The controls of this game are admittedly maybe the worst in the series, but it's a fun time nevertheless. There are six worlds to explore, the levels aren't too terribly gimmicky, and every environment is quirky and strange and teeming with gonzo flavor in a way that really reminds of me of SMB2, but ratcheted up to a higher degree.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I consider this to be the "final" Mario game because it's the last main Mario platformer where he isn't shrieking "Yahoo! — Here we go! — It's-a me, Mario!" all the damn time.
1994: Donkey Kong
One game does get honorable mention, though: the one that brings us full circle, back to where we started.
Donkey Kong '94. This game is fucking
fantastic. It clearly takes place outside of any canon or continuity, a trait it shares with all of the later Mario games; there was no pretending after this game that it was possible to sort the Mario series into a single coherent story. But by this time, it didn't matter, because this game was just too fun. The gameplay mixes arcade
Donkey Kong action with
SMB2 picking-up-and-throwing-shit in a puzzle-platformer that's just a joy to play through every time.
A follow-up game on the Gameboy Advance, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, tried to recapture the magic of this one and didn't quite pull it off. Do yourself a favor if you've never played DK94: bust out the old SNES and Super Gameboy, track down this cart, and give it a whirl—or, you know, just emulate, it's easy—and play through this game. It's one of the essentials. Maybe the last of the 2D Mario essentials that everyone ought to play through.
• • •
Next time, I'll go back to talking about D&D again. I need to clean up my alternate thief and put it into context with the other AD&D classes. So, yeah—that, and hopefully soon! ∎