Retro spotlight: Super Mario Land
Retro spotlight: Super Mario Land
This game was a weird one when it released in 1989, and subsequent releases haven't made it any less weird.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
The quickest way to explain Super Mario Land is to describe it as some kind of Bizarro World Mario. It mostly looks like Mario. It mostly plays like Mario. But something is off. Not bad: just… off.
What makes it weird, though, is also what makes it fun. Mario traverses lands with an ancient Egyptian influence. He makes a stopover on some Easter Island-like… well, I can’t confirm if it is also an island, but it’s got the statues, at least. Mario has to fight off ninjas that rebound from being squashed by jumps in a medieval Japanese setting. Instead of fireballs, Mario fires off bouncing balls that harm enemies and ricochet off of walls, ceilings, and floors. There are even shoot-em-up segments! Shigeru Miyamoto did not work on the game — a first for the Mario series — and neither did its typical composer, Koji Kondo. Instead, the fathers of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi and Satoru Okada, were in charge of development as producer and director, respectively, and Chip Tanaka handled composing duties, and, as was typical of his work, nailed it even as he completely changed what Mario music sounded like in the process.
Super Mario Land was their chance to show off what the system was capable of, as it was a launch game for the Game Boy. You have to remember that the Game Boy wasn’t necessarily expected to thrive. It was using common tech, not exciting, high-end, newer tech. That fit with Yokoi’s general philosophy, “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology,” which was explained in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House. “Withered” here means technology that is well-understood and widely available, which also tends to be cheaper than more cutting-edge tech everyone is trying to figure out. In a nutshell, Yokoi felt that figuring out ways to push older hardware, doing so relatively inexpensively so that it can be pushed to a mass audience ready to consume it, made more sense than going all-in on newer technologies that were not yet understood, and were more costly, too. This is how the Game Boy ended up with a green-tinted, monochrome screen that looks like it belongs on a graphing calculator, instead of like Sega’s Game Gear, which looked great, sure, but also used up half of its battery power when you turned it on.
Nintendo did not always subscribe to this philosophy, especially after Yokoi’s exit in 1996, but they have tried to blend innovation with newer technologies and utilizing older, cheaper tech quite often. The Wii had all those motion control components, but it also remained in a pre-high definition state, since the majority of households were not, at that time, HD-ready, and the previous generation of technology was less expensive to work with and better understood. Even the Switch, for all its innovative features, is mostly “withered” technology being utilized in new ways, and it, too, is purposefully lagging behind what Sony and Microsoft do from a pure horsepower perspective.
Anyway, Super Mario Land was tasked with helping to prove that the Game Boy, monochrome screen with a green tint or no, was capable of bringing joy to gamers. And it certainly succeeded in that goal, as it sold 18 million copies and helped the system get the running start it needed to against its eventual competition, like the aforementioned Game Gear (basically a miniaturized Master System with a backlit, color screen), the Atari Lynx with its color LCD screen and ambidextrous button layout, and the TurboExpress, which was produced by NEC and Hudson Soft, and was basically a portable Turbografx-16 that had an LCD screen and could play the entire TG-16 HuCard library.
All of those handhelds were technically impressive, and far more so than the enormous drab brick that was the Game Boy. Nintendo’s handheld had the games, though, and was able to sell for just $90 because of its cheaper production costs. The Game Gear was listed at $150, the Lynx at $180, and the TurboExpress at a whopping $250. Given that, monochrome or no, which one were your parents going to push you toward asking for? That it had a Mario title on it from the start, and was the first of the bunch to hit the market, made the decision and discussions easy.
It’s worth pointing out here, too, that Yokoi’s post-Nintendo team, Koto Laboratory, developed the Bandai WonderSwan. The Japan-only handheld utilized older technology, just like Yokoi’s Game Boy, in order to boast about its battery life and sell for ¥4,800, which converts to just over $40. Even the color version of the WonderSwan sold for under $60! The WonderSwan and its successors released after Yokoi’s death in late-1997, but both Koto and Bandai maintained his design philosophy in this final product of his.
So, Super Mario Land was a chance for a proof of concept, one that it nailed. It’s not the best Mario game by any stretch of the imagination — it didn’t even make the Nintendo top 101, because, as it turns out, a company that has been making games and consoles for as long as Nintendo has managed to produce quite a few good ones, at least 101 of which are better than today’s subject. That isn’t a knock against Super Mario Land, however. It’s kind of the ideal handheld experience, especially for the time. It was short, sure, coming in at about an hour thanks to containing just 12 levels across four worlds, but it felt like Mario even when it was doing things that weren’t very Mario-like, and no one even knew if that was possible until it was attempted.
It had the challenge, it had the platforming, it had familiar concepts, and it introduced new ones for you to learn and overcome. Its weirder bits were so off from the typical Mario formula that it is both barely like its own sequel, 6 Golden Coins, and also the most like that game when compared against other Mario titles. Nintendo never really built on the game’s concepts to keep them going in other titles, which probably has a lot to do with Miyamoto’s absence on this title and his being back in control for the non-Mario Land games. It’s not that there is any implication here that Miyamoto didn’t like Super Mario Land. It’s just that it wasn’t his Mario, so he didn’t make his Mario like someone else’s Mario.
This decision to veer off from being just like the Mario everyone knew was probably for the best, though, even if it was temporary, because it managed to showcase the kind of surprise and joy the Game Boy was capable of. Instead of just “Mario you can carry around,” it was “Mario you can carry around, that you can also only find on the Game Boy.” That’s a choice that sets expectations, and gets people to buy the Game Boy because they want specifically what it has to offer, instead of just being satisfied with the console they’ve got at home. There’s a reason I think the superior version of the Playstation Vita is the one that we saw after it failed, where indies and visual novels and JRPGs were given a spotlight because Sony had given up on making it a first-party success that exactly replicated the at-home experience on a smaller screen. Replicate the home experience, sure, but don’t discount the chance to produce something no one else can, either. The Game Boy had its share of “just like on console!” experiences, sure, but it had a whole bunch of titles that highlighted the Game Boy more than anything, and that’s one of the reasons the system persisted so long even with technology that seemed outdated on launch day.
It’s been made clear that Super Mario Land was an important title, but yes, it’s also still fun to play today. It avoids being just like the game it most closely resembles, the original Super Mario Bros., thanks to its varied locales, the changes from standard Mario fare like the fire flower to the super ball, as well as making it so that when you squash the Koopa-like creatures, they do not hide in their shell that you can then kick, but instead turn into explosives you need to run from. There are horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up levels that have you taking down both enemies and obstacles in order to progress, and while they aren’t incredible experiences, they are good enough that I can lament that Nintendo never followed them up by making their own Air Zonk-style game featuring Mario.
Super Mario Land isn’t overly difficult the first time through if you’re familiar with side-scrolling Mario titles, but when you finish the game, you unlock a harder mode that features more enemies. There’s more than just that one hour to play here, and since the game itself is worth revisiting every now and again — I didn’t even come back to it with the intention of writing about it, it had just been a couple of years since I picked it up — it’s certainly worth the price of admission these days. Which is either for $4 on the 3DS eShop, or emulating it since owning a 3DS is the only way to buy a non-secondhand copy these days.
That 3DS release, by the way, takes care of the one major issue that Super Mario Land has. Everything on screen was real small. Like, real small. It wasn’t a game killer or anything, but older eyes or ones that need lenses the strength of mine probably will be more annoyed about it than someone who can see just fine. The 3DS release bumps up the sizing of everything with a 60 percent zoom, so it all looks like it should, size-wise. It’s not quite as large as everything in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins comes in at, but it narrows the gap between the sprites of the two by a considerable margin. A welcome update, says someone whose eyes are like three decades older than they were when they first set their sight on Super Mario Land.
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