Games inside games: Beetle Mania (Super Mario RPG)

A full-color fixed shooter on the Game Boy (?), contained within Mario's first role-playing adventure.

This column is “Games inside games,” in which I’ll write about game contained within — and only contained within — another game. No secret playable Wolfenstein inside of a different Wolfenstein here, but original games exclusive to the games they’re contained within. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Game

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was Mario’s first role-playing game, developed in a partnership between Squaresoft and Nintendo for the SNES. It released in the spring of 1996, months before Nintendo switched its focus to the Super Nintendo’s successor system, the N64, and two years after the Playstation had begun its domination of the market. So, Super Mario RPG is not the most commercially successful Mario title out there by any means, but it did still manage to move over two million units, good for 21st all-time on the SNES. One wonders what its impact would have been had it released earlier on in the system’s lifespan instead of toward the end there, right on the border of swan songs and post-peak cult classics, but even with the timing, making the top 25 is pretty great.

That comparatively lower sales figure — 2.1 million is a lot of cartridges, sure, but Mario Paint sold more copies than that, and Super Mario RPG is closer to Super Metroid in sales than it is to the next-lowest Mario game to sell at least 1 million copies — has little to do with its overall quality, however: Super Mario RPG is a classic Nintendo title that’s seen release again and again whenever Nintendo creates a service that makes old titles available once again, and conceptually did enough in the moment for the Big N that they handed development duties of future console Mario RPGs over to Intelligent Systems, the studio behind Fire Emblem and plenty of other series, and portable Mario role-playing games were the duty of AlphaDream, after Square’s defection to Sony’s Playstation meant there would be no more Mario projects featuring Final Fantasy battle themes.

The Game Inside The Game

Beetle Mania, which is 100 percent a play on the phenomenon of “Beatlemania,” is found within Super Mario RPG. It’s nothing like what Nintendo usually developed, nor what Square was known for: it’s a fixed shooter with a heavy emphasis on scoring. Despite being just a side game with no other release, there are people who have spent a considerable amount of time mastering this little shooter, and have achieved some eye-popping scores because of it.

Image credit: Strategy Wiki

Just for context, you score all of two points for successfully shooting one Koopa shell, but you can find videos floating around with scores of over 5 million points. And they didn’t sit there for four hours like someone trying to set a Space Invaders record, either: the game has deeper mechanics than the two-points-per-kill notes suggests.

Beetles are a big deal in Super Mario RPG: there are characters obsessed with them, mini-games where you go hunting for beetles, and even a video game starring one who’s capable of taking down hordes of Koopa shells with a single shot. Clearly an ode to Ringo’s own powers.

How To Get To Beetle Mania

Beetle Mania is pretty easy to miss. It’s not “hidden” in anything so obvious as an arcade cabinet, and there is no NPC asking/forcing you to play it as part of the main quest line. Instead, you have to have bothered to chat up one particular NPC in the inn in Mushroom Kingdom, who is playing it on what appears to be a Game Boy again and again until around halfway through the adventure, after you’ve recruited the full party of five characters and have returned to the city with the Princess in tow. At this point when you speak with the unnamed youth, they manage to set a new high score instead of failing due to your constant interruptions, and he’s now willing to forget the past and sell the game to you, likely to fund their next purchase.

It’ll run you 500 coins, no small thing for a game where your wallet can fit just 999 of the things and you’re constantly upgrading your weapons, armor, and accessories. It’s worth the price, though, since, being a Game Boy-ish game, it’s “portable” and just added to your menu once you buy it. Then you’re able to pull it out and ignore your duties and quest to save the world whenever you want in favor of chasing a new high score. We can all relate to Mario there, to some degree.

Apparently, per The Cutting Room Floor, Beetle Mania was supposed to be an item in your inventory that sold for 999 coins, with a description of, “A super popular video game!” It ended up just being a menu selection instead, which is probably for the best since Super Mario RPG’s inventory space was limited enough as is without including a video game within it.

What Is Beetle Mania?

Beetle Mania is a fixed shooter where you play as a beetle. You can scroll left and right, a la Galaga and many others from the genre, but can’t move your beetle up, down, or diagonally. Just left and right, which is fine, because the screen is going to fill up with Koopa shells. Lots and lots of Koopa shells.

You fire your single-shot, a star that comes out of the beetle’s mouth, and it’ll explode a shell upon striking it. That wouldn’t make for much of a game on its own in 1996, but to give Beetle Mania something to make it stand out besides “is beetle,” each exploded shell creates a ring of shrapnel, aka “revenge bullets” in shoot ‘em up parlance, that fire forth from the center of the shell. These can hurt you, so you’ll want to steer clear, but even more important is that they also damage other shells. Shells are worth just two points each upon death, unless they’re part of a larger chain reaction, in which case multiplication is on your side. Catch a second shell in the explosion of revenge bullets, and you get four points for that. A third, eight, a fourth, 16, and so on. Your score will climb slowly at first until you get the hang of letting enough shells fill the screen to start seeing “256” flash across it instead of those low-level figures, and then, it’ll grow in a hurry, up to a maximum of 9,999 per shell, which you can see happen in the 5.2 million point video I referenced earlier:

Letting the screen fill up with shells to prepare for a massive score-boosting chain reaction isn’t necessarily easy, though. The shells move quickly, and everywhere, and even though they aren’t aimed at you, they’ll often find you anyway. You can survive for much more than one hit — there’s an invisible stamina meter for your beetle that determines whether you can revive or not after getting hit, and you revive by pressing buttons like mad after taking damage in the hopes of getting up before the count of three. If you manage to score 10,000 points, a heart will drop from the top of the screen, and if you grab it, your stamina will be partially refilled. So you can keep going for a long time, but the heart doesn’t bring you back from the brink to full health, and scoring even 10,000 points can be difficult at first, until you get used to reading the movements of the shells and can not just understand their physics, but properly react to them, too. Then hearts might drop faster than you can even collect them, since you’ll also be busy trying not to die in a screen full of shells and revenge bullets.

Even as an optional mini-game within an RPG, even developed by a company not necessarily known for shoot ‘em ups — it wasn’t Einhänder time for Square just yet — there’s a clear understanding of a basic principle of STGs, in that scoring and survival aren’t particularly compatible strategies. To stay alive, the longest, you’ll have to shoot every single shell before it can bounce around and eventually ricochet into you. But your score will be much lower than if you hold off from shooting until a single shot will kick off a screen-clearing chain reaction, which in itself is dangerous for your health since it means the screen only actually clears after all the revenge bullets disappear.

Beetle Mania is more a diversion than anything, but it’s a welcome one, yet another thing to do on the side in a game that pretty efficiently packs in an otherwise straightforward (but highly enjoyable) role-playing experience. It’s a shame Nintendo hasn’t hidden it in any other titles, nor did they make it a DSiWare release like they did for WarioWare’s single-screen score-attack game, Bird & Beans. But at least you can access Beetle Mania in whatever release of Super Mario RPG you’ve decided on having in the present, and hey, it has an unofficial TI-89 calculator port so you can finally play on the kind of grayscale screen this “Game Boy” game was supposed to be on, instead of a 16-bit, full-color one.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.