Hacker News Reader

Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Agreed about GTA, but not about Super Mario. At the very least you'll need to kill Bowser to finish the game.

Bowser always survives and shows up again in the sequels.

And GTA has a limited pool of pedestrians that repeat themselves and return over and over.

That’s different. In Super Mario Bros., every Goomba in the game is an identical sprite, but story-wise - to the extent the game has a story, anyway - you’re meeting a series of different creatures of the same species. This is evident if only from the fact that there are often multiple on screen at the same time. The more modern GTA has a variety of looks for pedestrians rather than just one, but the same principle applies: the NPC you just met might look identical to the one you killed the other day, but story-wise, we should assume they’re two different people - because it makes more sense that way and the game hasn’t told us otherwise.

Bowser, on the other hand, is a named character with a specific personality. Combined with supplementary materials and (in some Mario games, especially the RPGs) in-game dialogue, it’s clear that he’s meant to be a single character who Mario (also a single character) encounters repeatedly.

I'd almost suggest that discussing the morality of pixel manipulation is a bridge too far, but this is sort of why I come here.

I sort of now want a PETA for video game pixels.

They should make a GTA sequel where your nemesis is a random pedestrian that you ran over in a previous game without even noticing.

I'm taking it as a different version of the same story. Like in Zelda. Link definitely kills Gannon every time...

He kills himself at the end if I recall correctly, unless you consider moving out of the way of his attacks as killing him.

Not in the original Super Mario Bros. You run across the bridge, dodge Bowser's attacks, and "win" by reaching the Axe on the far side. The strong implication (within the NES's limited visuals) is that by collecting the axe, you have destroyed the bridge and sent Bowser plummeting into the lava. Alternately, you can hit him repeatedly with Fireballs, and he will eventually die like any other enemy.

Mario absolutely "kills" Bowser in the original games. Though, of course you're quite correct that he returns in the sequels, and it's heavily implied that the Koopa clan does not die upon contact with lava, unlike the rest of the creatures in the kingdom.

https://www.mariowiki.com/Axe

Reply on news.ycombinator.com