What’sSuper Mario Bros. Wonderabout?
Reader, I could not be more excited.
“The first Super Mario game was full of secrets and mystery,” Mouri added.
This is wonderful stuff, because it’s true that Mario has always been about secrets.
And it’s true that as the games have progressed, players have come to expect those secrets.
I didn’t understand the form, so I didn’t understand the parameters.
I had no way of guessing what was possible.
At the same time, game designers were not yet working with too many established genres.
And this is because of a point that Mouri touched on with Tom when they spoke.
It’s because the secrets were kind of famous, even back then in 1990 or whenever.
My sister had bought a second-hand NES and it came with a copy of Super Mario Bros.
There was more to the game than we first realised, he explained.
And we should maybe investigate World 1-2.
You know what happened, obviously.
In my memory, we found this stuff almost immediately.
Mario’s secrets, in other words, were a way into thinking about how the games were made.
They were the beginning of a dialogue, I think.
In Mario games, I always feel like I’m in dialogue with the designers.
Mario games - like a lot of games - are telling you how its designers think.
They’re telling you where they like to hide things, where they like to wrong-foot you.
And of course, I thought of it first."
By the time we played Super Mario Bros. 2, we were on the lookout for secrets.
We just accepted the odd things the game now did as being an evolution of Mario.
Now he pulls up veg.
Now he throws enemies at other enemies.
Fine, on with it.
What I remember the most about this game is the level with the whales.
It’s left to right, as is the time-honoured tradition.
What happened if you went the other way?
What happened was that there was something waiting for you there!
It felt like meeting up with an old friend we had not seen since Mario 1.
It was the designer again: hey, we got here first once more.
Well, Mario 3 and Super Mario World were just like that.
These games were like jack-in-the-boxes, waiting to erupt with endless surprises.
“You made it here?
We got here first.
