Notes From LIRGE: Hands-on With the Weirdest Super Mario Port

Notes From LIRGE: Hands-on With the Weirdest Super Mario Port

Hudson was so preoccupied with whether or not they could....

As you are of course aware after having read yesterday’s post, Limited Run Games helped sponsor the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo this past weekend. And it ruled. Great location, great interactive museum, great people.

However! Not everything on display at LIRGE was the kind of thing to bring joy to the most benighted of hearts. Wandering into some of the more esoteric areas of the convention, you were bound to find strange game oddities. Dank corners of history ideally left forgotten. Sometimes, they even wore a familiar face.

Consider Super Mario Bros. Special. Released exclusively in Japan for a home computer that only ever appeared in Japan, Super Mario Bros. Special is precisely what the title suggests: a very special version of Super Mario Bros. But please don’t read “special” here to mean “of exceptional quality” or “the product of exacting craftsmanship and immense love and care.” No, you’re meant to say the word “special” here the same way middle-aged Southern ladies say, “Well, bless your heart”—subtext abounds here! And considerable unhappiness!

Super Mario Bros. Special is a rare instance of Nintendo licensing out its NES creations for another company to adapt to a non-Nintendo system. You can more or less count the number of times that’s happened throughout history on a single hand. Everyone knows about how Philips snagged the license to Mario and Zelda for creating CDi software as part of a business dispute with Sony over CD-ROM licensing in the early 1990s, of course. Less familiar is the fact that Sharp was allowed to both create Nintendo-compatible hardware (including the cool Twin Famicom and some highly coveted televisions with an integrated Super Famicom cartridge port) so that Nintendo could use the name “Family Computer” for their first console despite Sharp having a claim to that name.

Well, Super Mario Bros. Special seemingly resulted from one of those same handshake deals. The developer, Hudson, did a lot of work with Nintendo in the early days of the Famicom, which included putting together an entire setup that allowed the Famicom (again, “Family Computer”) to finally live up to its billing by incorporating a full keyboard and the ability to create and execute BASIC programs on the system. Since Hudson brought computing into the world of Nintendo, perhaps it was deemed only fair to return the favor and bring Nintendo into the world of computing. And so Hudson was granted rights to produce a handful of adaptations of Nintendo games, including a bizarre sequel to Donkey Kong 3 and a quirky reinterpretation of the original Mario Bros. called Punch Ball Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros. Special was the most notable (and substantial) of these collaborations, an officially sanctioned attempt to bring console megahit Super Mario Bros. to the NEC PC-8801 home computer, which had a significant following in Japan.

There was just one problem with that: The PC88 had no business trying to run a game like Super Mario Bros. The console had remarkably high graphical resolution, thanks to the fact that NEC designed it as a business computer that supported the intricate Chinese-derived calligraphic symbols that comprise Japan’s written language. That’s the only graphical advantage the PC88 had, however. It had terrible color selections—most models only allowed eight colors (versus the 52 of the NES/Famicom). It also tended to animate and re-draw images on the screen more slowly than the NES did. Oh, and the game lacked any support for scrolling… which was kind of the entire point of Super Mario Bros.

Needless to say, the choice of hardware did Super Mario Bros. Special no favors. To play this adaptation is to marvel at how badly the classic NES could have gone. The game has a jarring color palette, and everything moves with a sort of flickering stop-start quality. You might be able to look past these visual defects if it controlled better, but the action feels alarmingly off-kilter here. When Mario jumps, he rises about twice as fast as he should and then sort of lazily floats back down to the ground, which makes precision jumping incredibly difficult and mucks up his responsive mid-air steering and severely complicates the all-important act of stomping enemies. That in turn is made even more difficult by the fact that collision detection in Super Mario Bros. Special comes off as being based more on vibes than on where objects actually appear on screen.

Oh, also, because the PC88 can’t scroll, the screen “flips” when you reach the edge and draws the next screen. There’s a load time of roughly a second during these transitions. It’s difficult to express just how much of a mess this makes of the entire gameplay loop, since so much of Super Mario Bros. hinges on smooth movement and being able to dart forward at high speeds while looking ahead to the hazards before Mario, landing with precision on tiny platforms or enemies at high speeds, and generally relating to the game physics as a friend rather than a foe. You won’t find any of that here!

Needless to say, playing Super Mario Bros. Special is a very different experience than the NES game. It’s not fun, precisely. But it is very interesting, and entertaining in the same way that “kaizo” Mario ROM hacks (or, more recently, fan-made Super Mario Maker levels) can be. It takes something initimately familiar for most people and reworks it into a punishing experience that always defies your expectations. The level layouts have very little in common with those of the NES game, and they’re much longer here… and when you die, no matter how far into a stage you’ve managed to advance, you go back to the beginning of the level! It’s truly a brutal way to play Mario. Weirdly compelling in its way. Had this been the original form of Super Mario Bros., that game would not have taken the world by storm… but since the majestic NES release exists, we can savor this one as the Mirror Universe version of the game. Evil and wrong, but still kind of fun to watch.

And hey, maybe the way this one turned out helped inspire NEC and Hudson to collaborate soon after to create the TurboGrafx-16—the console that was designed as a better version of the NES. It certainly could have done greater justice to Super Mario Bros. than the PC88, that’s for sure.