Princesses, Mushrooms and Everything

Given that this year marks the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., I revisited the game in the hopes of remembering some of what I felt when I first played it almost 30 years ago. What was Super Mario Bros. to me in that brief time when it hadn’t yet become a game that is almost impossible to separate from its influence on gaming history, and could simply be itself, singular and extraordinary?

What I remembered most, playing the game yesterday, was how wondrously strange it had seemed to me then, and the reason it seemed so strange was that up until that point, Mario himself had seemed so ordinary. The settings in which I’d seen Mario (and Luigi) previously were industrial and functional; construction sites, factories, sewers. 

Obviously Mario got himself into some pretty bizarre situations in Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., but he still seemed to me very much of this world. My entire concept of the world at that time was based on life in the Chicago area, and I could easily picture Mario at Wrigley Field cheering on the Cubs, or hanging out with the guy in all those Empire Carpet commercials that ran constantly on WGN.

So when I first saw Super Mario Bros, it required my mind to expand to accommodate new possibilities in more ways than one. Mechanically it was a revelation, everything about it both thrillingly new and so intuitive as to feel immediately familiar. 

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Because Mario doubles in size when you grab that mushroom and can then smash the blocks he could previously only nudge, going Super made me feel huge and tremendously powerful. And its setting was a land of mystery, ripe for joyous discovery. Underground tunnels, cloud platforms in the sky, hidden warp zones, castle fortresses ruled by a fearsome, fire-breathing lizard king. My imagination was ignited, and I wanted to push up against every barrier in the game to see what secrets might be waiting beyond.   

But just as strange and magical as all this was the experience of playing as Mario in this new environment. If Super Mario Bros. had been exactly the same game, only instead of playing as Mario, familiar to us from Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., you had played as a heroic resident of the Mushroom Kingdom, someone who was of that world, the game would have felt extraordinary, but it wouldn’t have felt transportive in the same way. The fact that it was Mario, someone I could see inhabiting my own world, my own street, made the barrier between my world and the Mushroom Kingdom seem permeable. If something so magical could happen to Mario, it could happen to any of us.

Films I liked in my childhood–The NeverEnding Story, The Last Starfighter–told stories about “ordinary people” who found themselves whisked off to amazing worlds in which they could be a hero and do something extraordinary.

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And this appealed to me tremendously. Super Mario Bros. was, for me, an entirely different way of coming at this same idea, because I wasn’t just watching it happen to someone else. In a sense, I was Mario.

Of course, back then I never stopped to think about how all of the “ordinary people” I was projecting myself onto who got to visit other worlds and be heroes were white and male. I didn’t see how the media I was given was already teaching me to see white male experience as not only universal but default, centralizing it to such a degree that other people and their experiences were displaced. What if Mario had instead been Maria, who had valiantly rescued her girlfriend in Donkey Kong and, with her sister, taken care of some unusual plumbing problems in Maria Sisters? Would I have felt the same connection to her and her adventures? Today, of course I would, but back then, I’m not so sure.

Nintendo definitely understands Mario’s “everyman” appeal, the ease with so many people can project themselves onto him. I think this 1990 commercial for Super Mario Bros. 3 demonstrates that. 

And I love that Mario can be a stand-in for all of us. I just want any of us to be able to be a stand-in for all of us, and I think movies and TV and games still center white male experience to such a degree that we’ve got a long way to go before we’re there.

Of course, now Mario is far more associated with the Mushroom Kingdom than he is with our world, and the Mushroom Kingdom itself has become familiar to us. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone today, coming to Super Mario Bros. for the first time, to understand what it was like to see such a familiar character in such an unfamiliar setting. But that was a big part of the game’s magic for me, back then. It said to me that extraordinary things can happen to any of us. 

I still believe that.