Super Mario Bros. 30th Anniversary | Hacker News Reader

Super Mario Bros. 30th Anniversary

mario30.nintendo.co.uk

206 pointsxvirk112 comments

Oh man, I'm not a full blown gamer, but I do play games. I fondly remember getting violently mad at my nintendo playing SMB in the livingroom. Throwing the controller, screaming. All that good stuff. I remember fighting endlessly to get to the end and save the princess... Just to be on the final level and my mom comes in, hits the power button and says "Time for bed."

Those moments growing up were the bane of my existance.. Super Mario Bros was the first game I ever fell in love with.. To this day, even with modern gaming and modern graphics. Super Mario Bros still holds my attention longer than any of those games ever could imagine.

Here I am sitting at my computer having just turned 30 years old 5 days ago, and I see this. My childhood friend just turning 30 years old too. I can't wait to introduce my daughter to the wonders of Super Mario Bros, and I will do it on the same Nintendo Entertainment System that my mother bought me and my sisters in 1985, that I've kept this whole time and still works flawlessly today.

> the same Nintendo Entertainment System that... still works flawlessly today

This is what worries me about modern gaming's "Day One patches" and other games released on disc in an unplayable state. Sony and Microsoft are going to take down those update servers someday. Will I be able to take DriveClub out of the closet in 30 years and play it on a PS4 purchased off eBay? I doubt it. And thanks to DRM & Friends, the patches will never be distributable by 3rd parties.

Indeed. It's also funny that the 800 number on the back for support still works today.

Really?

Care to expand a bit? This sounds quite interesting!

http://i.imgur.com/Xdy2S.jpg

In Nintendo's defense, this is their general customer support number that just has never changed and it's not meant to be just for the NES. But they do get people who ask about the NES and do help with issues still.

(That's an SNES in the picture, but yeah, the number is the same.)

It's actually one of the top-loading NES machines they made for only a couple years before the NES was discontinued.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System_%...

I think there should be a law forcing to release into public domain published works after their copyright has ended.

And, independently from that, the prolonging of copyright needs to stop.

This already exists. Everything with an expired copyright is, by definition, in the public domain. The problem is the absurd length of copyright, which has meant that no copyrights have expired in quite some time.

You are right. I meant to require them to release the source, but I didn't say that.

That's what the patent system is for. You patent something you're required to explain exactly how it works. In exchange you get exclusive use to that work for a period of time. I realize people don't give source code to the patent office, instead it's treated like copyright which I think is inappropriate (since source code is essentially a mathematical formula)

With copyright, I think there was a time when you were supposed to file a copy of the work with the Library of Congress.

The internet era aka the coupling era.

Playing the first SMB was probably the first defining moment in my life at the age of 5 or 6. I still remember every little detail about it - the super 1980s tv console, sitting on the tiled floor to play it, the Paula Abdul and Madonna posters on the wall, being amazed that I could press a button and Mario would respond instantly. It was at that moment that I fell in love with video games and haven't been able not to love them ever since.

Just a note: this is definitely not one of those "fall from grace" stories where SMB was some sort of pinnacle achievement in gaming. If you want to relive your childhood by playing a Mario game on a TV, get a Wii U and play NSMBU. It'll look "as good as you remember" (rather than having aged), and more importantly, it'll be a fresh set of challenges exercising the same skills, so it'll be just as hard as you remember, rather than just an automatic muscle-memory cruise. You will actually feel like a kid again, rather than an adult reminiscing.

People get so excited about "modernized ports" of the old Mario games... but Nintendo has already made them, with new levels! (I should also mention that Mario 3D World is everything I ever wished for while playing Mario 64.)

> It'll look "as good as you remember"

Only if you play it on a CRT TV. Games from that era look terrible on a modern HDTV.

I don't think you read my comment right; I was saying that NSMBU will look as good as you thought SMB1 looked as a child.

I remember the first time I played Super Mario Bros on an NES. It was like the first time I used an iPhone. It was immediately obvious that everyone else had been doing it wrong all along.

In many ways, it's a "perfect" game. Smooth scrolling, no frame rate issues, cool art style, amazing music, excellent control. No tutorial levels, no shitty movies, no hand-holding. Just - go. It blew my mind in so many ways. Way ahead of its time.

The first game on the PC that came close to matching that experience was Commander Keen, which was, what, 1991? 6 years later...

Fun fact, Keen was originally a Mario port but Nintendo didn't want it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen#Creation_and_de...

No save games. This is a complete deal breaker. Yes, those first couple of levels are really, really good, but they are not good enough to let the developer demand that you play them again and again, instead of letting the player get on with new challenges.

I really don't consider Mario games interesting until Super Mario World, unless you have an emulator with save states.

The first time I played it was in the arcade. I was flabbergasted when I realized the NES version was exactly the same.

oooh! It's not exactly the same! The arcade is quite a bit more difficult. You need 250 coins for an extra life, and there are a handful of levels that are not on the cartridge. The NES version has a couple levels (I think it's 1-3 and 2-2) which show up again later with slightly more characters, but in the arcade those later levels are completely different.

*though the graphics and mechanics are the same and I'm sure that's what you meant. I'm a big fan and it bugs me that I can only play those levels through MAME.

This is not about the arcade title 'Mario Bros.'. 'Super Mario Bros.' was never released to the arcades.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.

Edit: OK, seems like I was wrong :-)

Everyone is talking about Playchoice 10 (which I never saw), but the Wal-Mart nearest to my house had "VS. Super Mario Bros" when I was a kid. It was like alternate reality Mario. Super Mario Bros with harder levels.

http://www.mariowiki.com/VS._Super_Mario_Bros.

Awesome, I knew about PlayChoice when I was a kid, but I never knew about VS Super Mario Bros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcRHqfBhTh4

It really does look quite a bit harder.

To help anyone who doesn't realize it, HN is eating the period from the end of that link in the parent post (which is necessary to avoid getting a page without any text).

Yes, it was. (I saw one in the wild many years ago)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayChoice-10

In m_st's defense, this wasn't really an "arcade" version of SMB, but rather they took an NES, slapped 10 games in it, and put it in an arcade cabinet (not literally, but functionally).

Most games that originated on the arcade and later became console games were usually ports. However, in the case of PlayChoice 10, all of these games originated on the NES, and were "ported" (but mostly unmodified) from the NES.

So when sehugg thought they were playing an arcade game, they were actually playing a (slightly modified) NES.

Mario Bros. arcade was ported to the NES, and it was modified. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros.#Reception

That's a distinction without a difference. Sega built arcade hardware almost identical to their SG-1000 console and ported some of its games to it. Most Neo-Geo arcade "MVS" cartridges were the same as the home "AES" carts except for the physical connector and arcade-specific stuff (checking for coin switches).

There's no platonic ideal that makes an "arcade" game vs a home system. They come in all shapes & sizes of cabinets. Some take coins, some take cards, and some are kept on free play to keep kids from running around a restaurant screaming.

I'd say the only real difference between an arcade game and a home game is where they were meant to be played.

Agreed. My point is that back then, most console versions of arcade games were "watered down" software ports after the fact. PlayChoice 10 was one of the first, more popular exceptions to this (the software remained practically unchanged).

There was the Playchoice release and also Vs Super Mario Bros. Vs Super Mario Bros is a true arcade version of SMB, which had harder and different levels from the home version.

http://www.mariowiki.com/VS._Super_Mario_Bros. (You need to manually add the trailing period, HN is stripping it)

This was also the only way to play Goonies in the US, they only sold the sequel for consoles here.

It did in a roundabout kind of way - a Nintendo arcade system called the Playchoice-10 let you play various NES games on a paid timer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayChoice-10

Yes it was, on the Playchoice 10 platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayChoice-10

and to be accurate, Vs Super Mario Bros (the arcade release) is different from the home version. The levels are harder. The difficulty ramp as you progress is much steeper. It's actually a very fun version of SMB because of the changes.

Someone made a near perfect JS port of SMB https://github.com/FullScreenShenanigans/FullScreenMario

When the Nintendo page showed "now loading," I was hoping Nintendo had posted their own javascript version of SMB...

Thanks for sharing this! it got me playing like a kid ;)

Feels a bit slow to be called "near perfect" but cool, I always love seeing Mario projects :D

the NES ran on an 8-bit processor at nearly 1.79 MHz with 2 kB of slow onboard work RAM. On the surface it would seem we could expect a 32-bit or 64-bit CPU sixteen generations later running at between 2 and 4 GHz with dozens of times that memory in just L1 cache, to be able to match that. But then Javascript is a helluva drug.

Did Mario always have this much... inertia?

I don't know how many people remember "The Wizard", but man what a brilliant bit of marketing on the part of Nintendo.[1]

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_%28film%29

I love The Wizard, it's so bad.

Since this is relevant today. Here I want to recommend this awesome game to you guys. It's two of my favorite games in one (portal+smb): http://stabyourself.net/mari0/

That looks remarkably awesome. Thanks for sharing!

I fully expected the post intro screen to be playable, would have been epic :)

Yes! Is it bad to say I was disappointed when it wasn't?

No. Why would it be?

I'm excited for Nintendo's new "Mario Maker". It's exactly what it sounds like: a game that lets you make Super Mario Bros. (or ~ 3, or ~ World, or New ~) levels!

That video you see, with the switching between games? Noticed that the blocks have a drop-shadow? That's because it's actually a Mario Maker level!

Website takes 5x longer to load than the game they made 30 years ago.

Well if they didn't make it load fast kids would pull it out and blow all kinds of saliva into it, slowing rusting the connectors and ruining the cart. If you blow that hard on your screen it's not so bad.

The Japanese site has polite Mario in the source.

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/mario30th/

(I think s/he means that it works with Flash disabled)

I think s/he means that the HTML source includes ASCII art showing Mario:

<!------------ SUPER MARIO BROS. 30TH ---------------

               \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
               \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
            \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
            \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
            #########++++++###+++
            #########++++++###+++
         ###+++###+++++++++###++++++
         ###+++###+++++++++###++++++
         ###+++######+++++++++###+++++++++
         ###+++######+++++++++###+++++++++
         ######++++++++++++###############
         ######++++++++++++###############
               +++++++++++++++++++++
               +++++++++++++++++++++
            ######\\\#########
            ######\\\#########
         #########\\\######\\\#########
         #########\\\######\\\#########
      ############\\\\\\\\\\\\############
      ############\\\\\\\\\\\\############
      ++++++###\\\+++\\\\\\+++\\\###++++++
      ++++++###\\\+++\\\\\\+++\\\###++++++
      +++++++++\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\+++++++++
      +++++++++\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\+++++++++
      ++++++\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\++++++
      ++++++\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\++++++
            \\\\\\\\\      \\\\\\\\\
            \\\\\\\\\      \\\\\\\\\
         #########            #########
         #########            #########

--------------- THANK YOU! -------------->

Somehow, going through it in my head 10 times, I kept coming up with new reasons that's only 20 years. "1985, 1995, 2015, that's 20.."

I finally had to check with a calculator and that's when I realized I skipped 2005.

This same kind of thing happened to me on that clock problem. Why does this happen?

Hey, I don't see Mario Paint on here! :)

Paper Mario isn't there either...

This is the one website that I wouldn't have minded having sound, so long as they played the mario theme tune :)

Then you may like this, Super Mario Levels. He has some moves! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_apb7EcsWgc

I didn't realize SMB was that old. Pac-Man just turned 35 on the 22nd [0], I wouldn't have guessed that it was only 5 years older than SMB.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593502

> This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Japanese release of the Super Mario Bros. game for the Nintendo Entertainment System on September 13th, 1985.

Wait... what? They're like 4 months early.

Thanks for reawakening my nightmares of getting absolutely clobbered by Super Mario Land on that brick of a GameBoy.

SML was the first game I ever got "good" at and could beat regularly. Largely thanks to hours and hours spent on airplanes. It's a difficult game, but fairly easy to master if you put the time in.

SML was HARD as in hyper strict, like GameGear Sonic (last time I couldn't beat the first boss). SML2 was quite complex but less hard. WL (aka SML3 ?) too, first (and only) game I owned 100%, got all the secret paths, tricks, gems, and even alternate endings.

That's what I love about those Koopa Troopas, man. I get older, they stay the same age.

Wow. Now I actually feel old. What great memories though.

Hopefully a positive sign (hint?) of Nintendo rereleasing its extensive back catalogue onto new mobile and internet platforms. I really hope they pull through on that.

I hope not. Unless they release a mandatory controller. Nintendo shouldn't accept vastly inferior (touch) controls.

Nintendo should buy out iPega.

I'm not really sure Nintendo needs anyone's help in how to make good controllers. They're pretty much the best of the best at it already.

Agreed.

If I could buy an iPhone with a hardware keyboard I would be extremely happy.

They already do: The 3DS and the Wii U.

I suspect we shall not be seeing a Nintendo-approved Mario platformer on iOS or Android anytime soon. Seems like it would just undermine their hardware sales.

Yes, exactly.

I don't understand the obsession people have with Nintendo releasing their games inside Apple's walled garden.

Nintendo already releases really great games, on good hardware specifically designed for playing those games. It's widely available, designed well for it's intended purpose and priced very competitively (32gb iPod Touch is $250, 32gb Wii U is $300 but also usually includes a ~$50 game).

They also sell a reasonable back-catalog of their older games. Their Wii U hardware is backwards compatible with nearly everything they've ever released (hardware-native compatible with Wii and GameCube, software-emulates N64, SNES, NES, GBA, DS, etc).

Nintendo isn't perfect by any means. But their setup right now is pretty competitive, and their hardware has been intelligently selected and priced.

Nintendo might gain a little bit of sales by jumping into iOS, but they'd loose a lot too -- way more than most people might realize.

This reminds me of when Apple was having financial problems late 90s, early 2000s, and the pundit's kept saying things like "license the OS!", "allow clones again and license to them!" and "stop being a proprietary platform!" etc.

To undermine your own brand like that by creating a shitty user experience and making the thing you have that is special into a cheap commodity makes no sense.

Nintendo's hardware right now isn't awesome (battery life on the Wii U GamePad is crap, etc.) but it is good enough to make the latest franchise games fun and playable for the family.

Apple's Mac OS licensing worked so well that they... oh right, they scrapped that. Hmm.

I think the reason people are obsessed with this is because no matter how good Nintendo's hardware is, or how cheap it is, or how available it is, it can't compete with the smartphone I already own and carry around in my pocket all day.

All else being equal, I'd rather have Nintendo games on my iPhone than pay $1 for a 3DS or a Wii U, simply because I always have my iPhone.

The problem, of course, is that all else won't be equal. Business concerns aside, the games are unlikely to be very fun on a touchscreen. Every fast-paced touchscreen game I've played has been an exercise in frustration and I don't think Nintendo can overcome that.

But if a person hasn't figured that out, or thinks Nintendo can overcome it, then it's pretty reasonable to want their stuff on iOS (or their other mobile platform of choice).

The disconnect that Nintendo of America has done a very poor job of marketing is that you don't need to be bored in public to play a 3DS. Sure, it could be a nice thing to have if you lived in the city and spent 30 minutes or more a day in public transportation, but among adult users (at least in America, where public transportation is uncommon outside of a few major cities), they're much more likely to play it while unwinding at home, while their SO is watching TV or surfing the web on a lazy sunday, while they're on the can, etc. Yet people, even those that love games, don't always realize this, and say things like "I already have a smartphone" or "I don't want to be seen "gaming" in public."

The closest functional analogue to a portable game console is not a smartphone, but a tablet. And while it's very fun to browse the web or watch videos on the couch with a tablet, even the best tablet games are no where near as engaging as the average portable console game.

Nintendo of Japan did a series of commercials to demonstrate this, showing Japanese celebrities relaxing at home, curled up on their couches, playing 3DS by themselves while thinking out loud to the audience. Another featuring the branding of a big pop star, and I'm sure there's many more that I never saw. AFAIK, Nintendo of America hasn't tried to market the 3DS to adults at all, and it's really not doing justice to the cross-generational appeal of many of their products.

Nintendo only really targets two markets, and neither of them "fit" with iOS.

- 3DS owners always have their 3DS, and don't usually own any Apple product, except rarely an iPod Touch. Why? Because they're Japanese schoolchildren, sitting around at recess battling one-another in Pokemon or somesuch. iOS doesn't fit anywhere into that picture.

- Likewise, the Wii U is still one of a long line of "famicom" (lit. "Family Computer") products. All the software written for it is written to encourage local multiplayer, with game balance choices made to cater to family members being those multiple players—thus why the "randomness" of items in Smash Bros, the rubber-banding in Mario Kart, etc. They're games that let younger and older siblings, or children and their parents, have a fun experience together even at disparate skill levels! Again, this isn't something that translates away from the "everyone sitting in the same room", so doesn't do well on mobile where everyone in the family would be expected to own their own iPod Touch or whatever else.

> But if a person hasn't figured that out, or thinks Nintendo can overcome it, then it's pretty reasonable to want their stuff on iOS (or their other mobile platform of choice).

It's reasonable to want it, I guess, but it's not reasonable to expect Nintendo to provide an inferior experience to players that also undermines their business.

I assume people don't think it'll be an inferior experience (unwarranted optimism about Nintendo's ability to produce great touchscreen controls?) nor that it would undermine their business (optimism about how many units they would sell on iOS?).

RPGs (no "real time" control, just navigating menus) are the only genre I can see being able to translate well to touch screen devices. So I could see an iOS Pokemon game doing well, and not a whole lot less.

Thing is, while an iOS Pokemon game would do gangbusters, would it be able to top the 10+ million copies at $40 a pop that Pokemon games (released almost every year these days, it seems) regularly clear, given that they'd have to cut the price considerably (or even make it "freemium") in order to sell to the typical iOS user? And even if it did sell better, would it be worth killing off what is arguably the main driver of 3DS sales and taking an additional corresponding hit on other, unrelated 3DS games?

Unless Nintendo goes totally bonkers, I think their iOS experiments are going to be limited to smaller puzzle titles and the like that fit into the existing "freemium" mold well, making a quick buck and advertising their bread-and-butter properties simultaneously.

I've tried gaming on my phone, and I simply can't play a platformer on a touchscreen.

I need to be able to feel the buttons as I'm pressing them.

Small correction, the Wii U does not play GameCube discs. Other than with Smash Brothers there is no way to use the GameCube controller.

Right. The GameCube discs don't work in the drive. But the Wii U hardware is still compatible with GameCube games. (A Wii U can naively run GameCube games without any modifications. So if Nintendo released one on their online store, for example, you could download and run it without any emulation)

Thanks, I didn't know that.

IPhone + U is not price competitive with just iPhone. The point of a modern mobile device is that you have 1 device not 7

Games designed for a gamepad don't work well on a phone/tablet. There have been attempts at normalizing a standard input, and it simply hasn't emerged. I think nVidia Shield is probably the most successful, but I don't even have a controller for mine (it was simply the closests to a sucessor the the Nexus 7 when google went the "premium" route).

I would truly love to see Nintendo move towards a more open (in terms of platform) space... I don't know how much they make on hardware, but if they released a bluetooth controller that combined with software for iOS/Android could be a boon to their back catalog sales... though sharing 30% with Apple/Google is probably what keeps them away more than anything... not sure how open Google would be to a reduced sales rate given their size, I know Apple would be unlikely.

For old games like that, it can be interesting financially. I'm not sure it matters a lot in the sales of the 3DS and the Wii U.

I hope by "mobile" you don't mean "mobile phones". Ugh.

I know Nintendo has partnered with DeNA [1] to build mobile apps, but I hope they remain mostly disconnected, and that Nintendo remains focused on continuing to build games for handheld and home consoles.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/nintendo-s-long-awaited-ste...

Nintendo has experimented with releases on non-Nintendo hardware before, even during the NES/Famicom era. They released a port of of Super Mario Bros. with original levels for the NEC PC-8801 called Super Mario Bros. Special. It was special all right: no scrolling, just flick screen graphics like Prince of Persia. And only four colors so the sprites were dithered and ugly.

Then there was the educational game market, with Nintendo licensing out Mario characters to Software Toolworks and others to produce educational PC games like Mario Is Missing and Mario Teaches Typing.

Then there was the CD-i but I'm not really counting that since it was the remnants of a deal to produce a SNES CD add-on.

I don't think this is going to be a move to mobile phones -- even though it's a money press to pivot from hard-to-produce good console games to shitty in-app-purchase-laden mobile-phone shovelware and that's just what Sega and Konami are doing. I think they will use mobile software to supplement the console experience. Imagine booting up a Pokémon Garden app that lets you check on the health of your Pokémon when you don't have your 3DS with you.

SMB Special port is even worse than expected http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0HQOKmAPRA

It's funny how limited these things were, yet I'm more immersed than Crysis or GTA. Maybe a psychology/nostalgia. But even these accounted for, I'm amazed that people were making fun toys out of such constrained hardware. It's all stupid and bare, but a bunch of invisible blocks gives big surprises. A tiny palette swap and you're into a secret coin-filled cave. It's like stories, a few words trigger your imagination better than pseudo realism. It's also a bit relativist, in 85 it was the best medium so we'd never question the visuals, and would go along with that adventure. Until SMB3 quality leap, the SNES etc etc. A recurrent question of mine nowadays is how low can you go (cpu/ram/colors) and still make a special gaming experience. Back in the days that was the art.

They licensed games on platforms even before that - Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong were ported to many home computers by Atari's home computer label, Atarisoft. Those were good ports, so I imagine Nintendo was enthusiastic to try it again later with those disasters.

Those date from a time when Nintendo sold arcade hardware but not home consoles, so shipping a Nintendo game on non-Nintendo consumer hardware was not considered a compromise to Nintendo's core business.

A graphic in that story indicates that Nintendo are moving towards a device-agnostic, subscription-based approach to game releases. Sort of Netflix, but for games. Challenges would certainly exist from a controller point of view, but if they can provide a controller standard to work across multiple devices it could work.

Of course, this is mostly rumour at this point. Interested in seeing what the Nintendo NX turns out to be.

> The graphic in that story indicates that Nintendo are moving towards a device-agnostic, subscription-based approach to game releases.

Where are you seeing this? I only saw a progression of the Super Mario Bros. games over the past 30 years. Nothing (that I could see) hinted at moving in this direction.

If you're referring to the hand drawing the board, this is more in reference to forthcoming Mario Maker title for the Wii U:

http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/i7YeZxnWhEFX6ST-sLdUBGm...

> Where are you seeing this?

The graphic with "Jointly develop and operate a new membership service that encompasses smart devices and dedicated video game systems" in the centre.

Are we looking at the same thing? [1] I'm not seeing this at all. The only thing I see is about the history of SMB.

[1] https://www.nintendo.co.uk/games/oms/mario30/index.html

The story link changed.

Here's another source for the image I'm referring to: http://www.vg247.com/2015/05/08/nintendo-rewards-pc-nx-wii-u...

Here's a direct link to the image: http://assets.vg247.com/current//2015/05/30l.jpg

My misunderstanding -- you were referring to my link, not the root link. I see what you're referring to now.

What else could they mean by "mobile"?

Mobile as in "portable". Which could include any array of portable (and non-phone) devices.

I thought that might be what you meant, I just always associate the word mobile with phones and thought I might have been missing something. The 3DS eShop already has a lot of popular NES games, though and keeps expanding fairly consistently.

I'm still wondering if they'll ever turn on that mythical infinite-money-firehose, the pokemon iphone MMO.

In practice it wouldnt really work, the rock-paper-scissors battle system couldnt be rebalanced for online PvP, but it sure is fun to think about the chaos that would ensue if they tried it.

I hope so, too.

It's funny, I've had no problems staying away from video games for 20 years but I'd jump at the opportunity to play Super Mario Bros 1, 2 & 3 on iOS.

Why not just run an emulator then? I don't think nintendo is eager to capitalize on that market and I don't really understand why there is any hype surrounding it.

I would but I've never been able to get them to work properly. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

On the second point, there was 'recent' news about Nintendo bringing games to iOS, etc.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/03/19/nintendo-games-iphone-ipad/

Pretty graphics are fine, but for me video games are mostly fun because of nostalgia.

Instead they should have expired from copyright starting at least two years ago so we could do it ourselves.

As always, Luigi is totally neglected.

Luigi just had a whole year to himself :)

http://www.mariowiki.com/Year_of_Luigi

For those like me who were curious, this year is in fact the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.

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