It’s a-me: How Super Mario became a global cultural icon | Hacker News Reader

It’s a-me: How Super Mario became a global cultural icon

economist.com

117 pointsbrandur45 comments

Super Mario games are way better than what they look at first glance, in my opinion. E.g. even the 16-bit SNES Super Mario World, with its modest looking by its time, has a huge amount of work below everything: the games are so good because there is way more than the first impression. Perfect game play, lots of secrets, pretty amount of freedom, etc. make you enjoy and love them over time. Pure genius, pretending being just simple video games.

I totally agree regarding SMW, IMHO it’s one of the best video games of all time.

Yep, plus the background music :)

How old were you in 1990? Because I was 12 and remember SMW's arrival very clearly. I had played video games enthusiastically for years. Super Mario World was not at all modest looking for its time. It was absolutely mind blowing. It was gorgeous and everything was so smooth, and the number of different animations Mario had, plus being able to ride Yoshi, it was a total revelation.

For the record, it was only in Japan that SMW was released in 1990.

Yep, but we started seeing images of it over here then. And I was lucky enough to have a friend who had a Super Famicom w/the Japanese edition. Even without being able to understand any of the tutorial blocks it was still amazing. (I know it sounds like I'm making that up but it's true. I knew at the time how lucky I was to be playing it early.) After playing his Super Famicom I was a little disappointed with the SNES hardware's purple buttons instead of the rainbow buttons on the Super Famicom.

Wonderful video game anecdote! I’m from Sweden so we had the rainbow buttons just like in Japan. The purple ones look super weird :D I hadn’t even started in 1st grade in 1990. I think SMW showed up on my radar in 1993 or so. Still love that game!

SMW was released in 1990... in Japan. In Europe it was released in 1992, and I was 16 years old then, with knowledge about software (I started programming at 12). Anyway, in both 1990 and 1992 there were much better looking video games (richer backgrounds, etc.). My point was that SMW focused in playability and fun, instead of the color count and overloaded graphics.

> Anyway, in both 1990 and 1992 there were much better looking video games (richer backgrounds, etc.).

Maybe in the arcade, certainly not at home in 1990 and 1991, SMW was one of the best looking games of the time.

Look at the games in 1990:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_in_video_gaming

Some of the best looking games of that year:

SMB3 just came out to the US, SMW was light years beyond it.

Bonk's Adventure was good looking for the time but doesn't hold a candle to SMW.

On the PC we had the original Commander Keen, which while a great PC game of the era, doesn't even begin to approach the quality of SMW.

Secret of Monkey Island was a beautiful game, but it is an adventure game. The screen is mostly static. SMW is far more impressive, being side scrolling and having parallax scrolling of multiple background layers (and occasionally foreground layers as you see in the forest.)

Nothing in 1990 compares to SMW.

If we jump forward to 1992 (by which point SMW is 2 years old):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in_video_gaming

Then we see Wolf 3D come out for the PC, which was really impressive and of course changed everything. But it wasn't like it made SMW look dated (besides being FPS vs. side scroller, Wolf didn't have very many types of enemies, had static ceiling and floor, etc.)

For side scrollers we have Ecco the Dolphin, which is a cool game but I don't think as visually complex as SMW.

Mega Man 4 looks great but is not doing anything graphically that SMW hasn't already done. It has a different art style that you may personally prefer.

On the Genesis we have Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which looks good but again doesn't have as much going on as SMW.

I'm struggling to find these games that were much better looking. Can you give me some examples?

When someone is a European game snob of that era they are almost assuredly referring to Amiga games like those produced by Psygnosis(e.g. Shadow of the Beast) which have some gorgeous painterly work in them, make good use of the hardware, play smoothly with largish sprites, and on occasion, showcased parallax scrolling effects. There were some pretty solid side-scroller and shooter games made for that platform - it was the lead for "Another World", which was groundbreaking on a number of levels. And there were also many games on that platform that were mostly-static adventure games not of the Sierra or Lucasarts imprint, but beautiful looking all the same: Silmarils made some of those, as did Horrorsoft.

That said, those kinds of games weren't actually the norm on the Amiga, either - there was far more low-end drek that threw higher fidelity, but artistically underwhelming, graphics on the screen sluggishly and semi-competently(ports from other platforms, licensed tie-ins). Console games did tend to have a higher average level of polish along most axes.

I had friends with Amigas and they had some great games but even the best of those couldn't compare with SMW or other top shelf SNES games.

Amiga had graphics almost on par with arcade machines (the golden standard of the time), have you actually looked at some screenshots of Shadow of the Beast and other Amiga games? Yes SMW had a great art style (I love it!) but it used simplified/cartoonish shapes. I still think Amiga was the best graphics you could get at home, unless you were so rich that you could buy arcade cabinets.

I'm not really interested in getting into some kind of Amiga vs PC fanboy debate. Those were tedious in 1990 let alone now.

But Shadow of the Beast, while an impressive game for the time and for the Amiga is not on par with SMW technically. You may prefer the art style of Shadow of the Beast, and that's fine, style is subjective. But technically SMW is just doing a lot more. The multi-layer parallax in Shadow of the Beast is only used on the flat levels without any level architecture, Shadow of the Beast has few frames of animation per enemy, and fewer colors per enemy, and fewer colors on screen (128 vs. 256.) I don't have the details of the Shadow of the Beast level engine but it seems like the levels are also made out of much larger blocks than levels in SMW.

Anyway, this conversation is getting boring and like I said I'm really not interested in any kind of "Amiga is the best of all times" shenanigans. I'm not a fanboy of any particular hardware, console, computer or otherwise. Every platform had good games, and things that were good about it and things that were less good about it. This thread was about SMW.

I don't understand why you want to slap the fanboy tag on me, when I actually said in my comment that I love both games. Also, sorry if I got you bored, I usually enjoy talking about technicalities and often forget that others around me might be uninterested.

I accept your point about the colour mode, it seems [1] that SMW has more colours on screen as you said.

Regarding the animation frames, I couldn't find info, I'd love to read about it so let me know if you have any good link.

In my parent comment I was thinking more about smaller vs larger sprites (up to 128px in SotB) [1][2], and flat colours vs extensive use of gradients (I don't have hard data on this but it seems pretty evident by just looking at a few screenshots).

[1] http://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beas... [2] http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/SuperMarioWorld/sprites/SuperMa...

I find no mention of Amiga games in your post, you keep mentioning PC games but in those times PC was far from having the best graphics.

I'm watching chrontendo - a chronological exploration of all the games released for the Famicom/NES https://www.youtube.com/user/Chrontendo

Super Mario did for video games like Star Wars did for sci-fi and special effects.

Am I missing something? Where are (all of) episodes of Chrontendo?

edit: nm, youtube's list has an electric boogaloo moment. Search within channel finds them just fine.

I don't recall the game being "modest looking" at the time. I remember being impressed with the greatly improved graphics and all of the beautiful colors. You have to consider Super Mario World as a predecessor to Super Mario Brothers 3. Perhaps removed from its historical context, it may look modest, but I was blown away at the time.

Don't think predecessor is the right word there, or you swapped your titles. Super Mario Bros 3 came out 1-2 years earlier than Super Mario World, not the other way around.

I'm aware that SMW is a SNES game, newer than SMB3 (NES). My point was that SMW is focused in playability and fun, and not in color count nor overloaded graphics (e.g. the SNES is able to show 32768 colors, while SMW color count is way far from that potential).

SMW looks good and they made good choices, but they weren't leaving that much in the tank (they even broke out Mode 7!). The SNES is theoretically able to show 32,768 colors through scanline trickery and/or color math, and has a sometimes-workable 256-color mode (but like its successor the GBA it's slow), but nearly everybody used the tile-based mode, where every 8x8 square was mapped to a 15-color palette.

(I have spent entirely too much time in the guts of that thing. Send help. And liquor.)

The reason it still looks good now is because they created a timeless art style with clear, readable sprites which didn't need many colors. Compare that with 16-bit era attempts at photorealism which look muddy today.

The same is true of Metroid Prime on the gamecube, which looks better than some modern games despite hardware which was underpowered even at the time, due to masterful art direction.

Shigeru Miyamoto named SMW the game he was most proud of. I can see why that is.

SMW, Super Mario Kart and The Legend Of Zelda on the SNES are milestones of the genre, never again has this level of perfection been reached in 2D gaming imho (excluding SMK here).

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is no. 1 on some all-time best of lists. Maybe its the impression it made on many of us in our youth, but a year ago I played it again, and it was still great. The music, the art style, the controls - its the stuff that nostalgia is made of.

I recently started playing ALttP again too and one thing that was really neat to see was the hitboxes of the swords. You can only hold your sword in four directions but youcan riposte by bumping against your enemy's sword and then hit their body without touching their sword. The precision in the synchronisation of what's seen on the screen and what's actually happening was so simple, yet so fascinating.

When I replayed I found the ending really satisfying. A mesmerizing effect with the 3D Triforce, triumphant music that makes you feel like a hero and you revisit places in the game and see how you restored them to good (your uncle is well again!) When the credits come with some parallax background you watch them silently and with crazy respect for the team and only then switch off the Super Nintendo.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JU0C_l4aac

Hyper Light Drifter, released this year, comes close for me. Imagine a cross between alttp and dark souls, with the art style and music of fez. It's superb.

It's not as expansive or elaborate as the snes marios or zeldas, but the gameplay is very polished and deep, and the plot is... well I won't spoil it ;)

SMK is 2D. Its like Doom or Wolfenstein in that its "pretend 3d".

I remember watching some silly Hong Kong movie on TV one night when I was living in a hostel in Taiwan in the late 1990's. The people staying at the hostel were all fairly young and included Americans, Brazilians, French, Germans, Japanese, South Asians and whatnot. Most of us were chatting in whichever languages we happened to have in common, or halfway paying attention to the TV. I forget what the movie was about, but at one point there was a dream sequence or something and suddenly the actors are wearing overalls and hats with big fake mustaches and they start running around big green pipes and jumping on turtle shells. And suddenly the whole room started laughing because everyone understood the reference. Mario was a cultural touchstone we all had in common.

Super Mario Bros supercharged my interest in appdev and eventually indie game making.

My first computer was an IBM PCjr with various games on floppy, a cartridge BASIC, and a spiral-bound programming manual. Not sure how old I was, old enough to read, but as I was flipping through the manual one day, I noticed one of my brothers had scribbled words next to the colors in the section on drawing to the screen: brown had "block", cyan had "sky", etc. It was a mapping of Super Mario Bros tiles to BASIC colors. It was at that point that I realized I didn't just have to play games made by others. I could make my own!

A couple decades later and I'm still making them. I like to think my skills have improved some since those days :)

I lived through Mario taking over the world and it's really no mystery; the main line Mario games have been universally really solid. The one black sheep, Super Mario Sunshine, is still a solid game it just was too big of a change from Mario 64 for people to handle at the time.

Particularly Super Mario Bros 1, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 really pushed games forward. Each one of them really opened up new possibilities in games that the rest of the industry was influenced by.

The amazing thing is that Nintendo did that with the Zelda series as well, but this thread is about Mario.

Super Mario Sunshine holds up pretty well. I still really enjoy going back to it today. Even more than Mario 64 (although that's still a great game too). The controls were a lot tighter than Super Mario Galaxy, I feel, because it didn't use any motion controls.

Im playing through SMG1 for the 1st time and the controls are a bit weaker than M64. Not bad, but there is a noticeable difference. Its still a fun game, but I fInd myself playing SMW more often. That one has perfect controls. Even on the Wii version.

Super Mario Sunshine caused me to buy a GameCube and to sell it within two weeks. That was a really bad game.

Super Mario Galaxy redeemed them.

Biggest issue of the Wii U has been no solid open world 3D Mario title.

Don't forget Mario Kart, another long series of genre-defining games featuring the same characters.

The original Mario Bros. is probably another black sheep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros.

The nieces still play Super Mario Kart with their friends. It would be cool if Nintendo could release a smartphone version of this, with multi-player over Bluetooth.

There's a Mario 602 star race all day today on Twitch. Unfortunately I can't find the link on my phone but it should be easily discoverable.

https://www.twitch.tv/602race

info: http://bombch.us/giU

(yes, speedrunners have their own, zelda themed url shortener.)

NES clones are still going strong in India :) Summers spent playing pirated games on 8-bit cartridges - what joy!

SNES sadly was a rarity, even if it was much better (I'd personally rate SNES higher than Wii). Frankly, if there were nice touch interfaces for SNES emulators, I'd gladly pay $10. Carrying a bluetooth gamepad is definitely an alternative.

If you can, try to get ahold of 'Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World' book by David Sheff. I got it eons ago as a freebie along with 'Arcade' magazine and proceeded to read it as I had nothing better to do at the time. It has to be one of the best game-oriented (industry) book I've read.

Sadly there was a real-actors saturday morning TV super mario show in the early 90ies which forever spoiled the character for me. (Even worse then the blockbuster movie). The games are the best there is, but he never became cool - in my humble opinion.

That was Sonic's job. But look what happened to him in the long term.

Maybe better not to be cool?

That show was fun, and for any of its faults, the SMB movie erased them in a transdimensional crater of awful

Thanks to Netflix, my 8-year-old and 5-year-old think it's a good show. It's cheesy, but it's hard for me to get too, err, emotional about it when I compare it to the other things I watched at the same age. (I never did see that when it was out.)

My wife was on the verge of putting the parental veto on it, but the kids moved on to other things. I didn't mind it so much, but the Netflix version has the Legend of Zelda stuff yanked out (presumably licensing issues), which probably helps out overall, as I gather that part of the show was legendarily (pun intended) annoying.

Yip, yap, ya-hoo!

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