Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 110: Super Mario Bros. 3

Episode Date: July 31, 2017

Ah, Super Mario Bros. 3. What more can be said about Nintendo R&D4's grand finale for the 8-bit era? Well, we managed to fill 90 minutes discussing this timeless game, so the answer is "a whole lot." On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Ray Barnholt, and Henry Gilbert as the crew takes a closer look at one of Nintendo's greatest creations, and find it's still worth beaming about.

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Customers who, on average, save $3,000. off the MSRP. So when you're ready to buy, visit TrueCar to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features are not available in all states. Hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and this is quite possibly the spookiest episode of Retronauts I've ever hosted, not because of the subject matter, but because all

the power went out in our vault studio. So we had to basically drag a search protector in here and light the room with our iPhone. So this is basically like telling ghost stories. but the subject is very much alive, so don't worry. Today's episode is about Mario 3. It's one of our kind of heavy hitter episodes. I like doing these because I feel like the fact that these sorts of games are good is sort of conventional wisdom,

but I think it's a good idea to occasionally go back and look at them again and remember why we like them so much instead of just saying, you know, taking them for granted. Of course this game is good. Before I go on, who else is here with me today? Oh, hang on a sec. It's me. Jeremy Perry.

Jeremy, that does not work in audio. Jeremy just took my... My iPhone is wrapped in a bag, by the way. This is our high-tech studio, and he held it under his chin, but... It was so scary for everyone else. Yeah, I was... I was scared. I'm trembling now. That was some folly work.

He was walking around in hay. Yes. He was wearing plastic... Chains made of plastic bags. That's right. There was a chain... These are the plastic bags I forged in life. I don't know.

I don't know what that's a metaphor for, but who else is here today? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and man, it's so dark in here. I think I'm in World 8th. Oh, I get it. With me today, so I'm one baseball cap away from doing retro game videos on YouTube. Oh, man, you need to be, well, Ray, you're not... Talk about my pickups this week. You got this year, Jeopardy, 25th Anniversary Edition for Sega Genesis.

It was a good eating. You missed your calling, but you need to be sitting in front of a giant, like, shelf of things to prove you're a real gamer, because you have to buy things to be a real gamer, I think. Yeah, but you watch those videos, and you notice those guys always intonate the first words of games. really weird. It's super Mario Bros. Like super Mario World. Are you that slow? I don't get it. Anyway. Ray's been doing some research. This is the punching down podcast, right? Yes. Okay, good.

We take out enemies that are smaller than us. But yeah, today's episode is all about Mario 3, and I mean, I think everyone in this room agrees that this is a great game. I mean, Henry's wearing a Mario 3 t-shirt, so unless he's a liar. I mean, yeah. It is, it is

my, it used to be my favorite Mario game. I'd actually knock it down to third favorite 2D Mario game now, but I do love it ever so much, yes. And everybody, I mean, New Super Mario Brothers really knocked it out of that. New Super Mario Brothers 3. Just the DS version for me.

But yeah, today's episode is about Mario 3. And before we get started, I want to talk about some of the people behind it. And I will say, we've covered a ton of these people in detail in past episodes, so please revisit our past episodes to hear more about these folks. But I will at least mention the team of 11 people

who made Mario 3. And if you're a regular retronauts listener, you should know most of these people by name. But of course, we have Shigero Miyamoto. I don't think I need to tell you who that is, but in case you don't know, he created Mario and Zelda alongside Takashi... Sorry, Takeshi Tezica.

And they were both sort of the architects of those two games, and they're kind of the biggest creative forces at Nintendo, at least on that side of the company. We like to refer to him as Shigs around here. Shiggy, I think. We're not British. We don't say Shiggy.

I'd prefer you did. Is Shiggy a British thing? No, it's just a jackass thing. Okay, yeah. Well, I mean, aren't they interchange? I can't, I kid. I haven't seen Shiggy on the internet written on the internet since like maybe 2003.

I never saw it written Shiggy until I worked with British people. Who did that and also wrote Rezi. No, they would call them like Shaza or something. Shaza. What the heck? Is that a magic spell? Yeah, I can picture an interview with him. in like 1999 title

Getting Shiggy with it and I'm sure that happened I'm sure I read that in next generation Please scan that in and send it to me I'm sure it happened Ray just walked out Okay so we have Shigura Miyamoto Takashi Tezuka

we all know these two guys are I mean they're super great game designers So we also have Katsiya Katsiya sorry Thank you Ray who's better at this than me He's a level designer on the game

I don't hear him that often brought up that often in games for Nintendo, but... He's the Animal Crossing guy. He is the Animal Crossing guy. He created it. I guess he'd probably produce his every game, but he directed Star Fox 1 and the unreleased Star Fox 2. I've had some interviews with him

kind of, but it's always with his protege. Ayakia. Oh, okay. And, Eguchi just kind of sits in the corner and, like, occasionally she'll ask him, like, can you say something? Oh, I see. He's just kind of like the lurking presence. I think he's ascended to executive heaven.

He's above talking to journalists, I guess. Well, he also was, like, a key designer of the Wii U, I remember. He was like, at the E3 of Wii U 2012, he was a key person to talk about Nintendo Land. Like, that was his baby. Though don't blame him for that. So we also have Kenske Tanabe, another level designer. He, of course, directed Mario 2, otherwise known as dokey dokey panic. Yes, I have to say this at every episode.

Did you know? It's been the one piece of video game trivia for the past. 20 years that everybody knows. But he directed that Mario 2. He is now Nintendo's retro producer, and by that I mean the company retro, who now makes the Donkey Kong country sequels that are really good, better than the rare ones, in my opinion. So he probably accounts, oh, I'm sorry.

Oh, no, go ahead. No, I don't want to spoil. More Tanabe facts. I was just going to say he probably, his present probably accounts for the presence of Mario 2 elements. Oh, yeah, I can see that. Being inducted into Mario Canon through Mario 3. Like Babams and Niji.

Ninja, yeah, yeah, that's right. He's probably in the room saying, like, these things were cool, guys. Remember that dokey, dokey paniku game? So we also have, of course, Koji Kondo, music and sound effects. I mean, he's the Mario composer. He has a team now that helps him, but it was basically just him in this era. Some other names, we have Hirouki Kimura, a character design, and Hideki Kono, character design and level design.

We talked a lot about him on our Mario Kart episode. He was sort of, he sort of is the Mario Kart head honcho now. Is that correct? I can't remember if it is Conno at this point still. Pretty much. I don't retain any information after these things end, so you'll have to remind me. And there's one other name I'll add to that too. Oh, sure.

He's Yochie Kotabe. That's right, yeah. All the art, including the Mario 3 arts that is on the cover that is on my shirt and all the amazing pictures that are in the instruction manual, that was all by him. He had been hired in between one and three. to be the official in-house Nintendo artist, who, especially on the Mario series,

like, he was handed the cover to one, and, like, could you make a defined art style for Mario based on Miyamoto's cover to one in Japan? I mean... I do love his art the best. But I will say, Henry, as much as I love the, how iconic that cover for Mario 3 is,

with the raccoon tail taking off, I think Mario 3's Japanese box art could be my favorite. boxer of all time. It's a great box. It is like basically look at all the shit that's in this game. It's just spilling out into the wilderness. It's just everything in the game is on that cover.

Maybe it's too busy for a non-landscape box you know, that because we had portrait boxes. Well, if you were to put that ad on an HD, well yeah, we have portrait boxes, so there was that. And also you put that on like a non-HD television. It's very busy. I, as a

piece of art, I like the three cover more. And I also and love the Japanese, sorry, the Japanese three cover book. And I love the Japanese commercial for three, which basically ends with a moving, animated version of that cover. It's really beautiful. As I said in the Mario Kart episode, look up the Japanese commercials for all of these games.

They're all like anime or claymation or something whimsical you haven't seen before. It's not like the edgy 90s advertisements that you're used to. But I'd say for the American side of it, like, it was just simplicity of like, this is all we need. a yellow background and Mario in a raccoons who like boom Like listen kid Mario can fly now Start bugging your parents immediately

Because this is all you need to know And we also Vogue later with like Final Fantasy 7 Metal Gear I actually really liked the extreme Mario 3 ads in America Like the one where Mario flips his skateboard And then vomits on his mom's face

I like the one where he keeps eating food And then explodes It's my favorite And to finish out the rest of the team What's that? Shouldn't have eaten that mint Nope nope One waffer thin mint

And we also have four programmers, who I will not name, because I only have so much time. They're also very important, but they're programmers, and they do a great job. But, I mean, these are, like, the top of the line people are the ones I wanted to talk about. And if you go back to all of our Nintendo episodes, you will learn more about them. I just don't want to spend time here reiterating stuff we said in the past. I mean, I think it probably would have been faster to have just, like, named the four people than to give the disclaimer. Well, I'm just wrapping up. Geez, Jeremy is giving me live notes, everybody.

So please leave a comment about that. I feel bad for them. I mean, there's some really great programming on display at Mario 3. It's a technical masterpiece. Well, I'm sorry I let everybody down to the press. We're in San Francisco where engineers are like gods here. Yes. Changing the world.

Bob's an atheist. Yes, I'm also very high right now. So let's move on. So that core team of people, I love seeing that list of the core team of people because you can see Nintendo from then each generation. as teams grew and grew, they still kept those core of people, but they just started, like, get spread out, like, you know, like butter on toast to different areas before they were all concentrated on like, okay, we're the guys on this team, and then it's like, well, no, okay, Tezica will direct this game,

and Miyamoto will direct this game, and then you get in the N64 area, they're like, well, you're in charge of this team, and I'll be in charge of this team, and yeah. So that's why Mario 3 has a yellow box because of butter? You can make that connection, I think. Amazing. Even at this stage, Miyamoto is becoming less of a hands-on kind of guy. I'm sure he is hands-on with this game,

but he's not as hands-on as Tezuka is with this game. He's already escalating to that producer role, which you will have soon, because he was not the director of Mario World. That was Tezica, correct? Yeah. Tezica pretty much ran the show. Yeah, I mean, he's like the main designer.

That's what director means in this context. I love that man. I was glad when he finally got to be in front of cameras more and do more interviews and be known to the public as... I don't think he wants to, though. He seems very shy. He's very shy. He's very shy, goofball, I feel

that. And he also, I think when I interviewed him one time, he I didn't ask him for this, but he described his relationship with Miyamoto as like, you know, Sempai and Kohi that, like, Miyamoto's the upperclassman. He's always going to be the boss, even as

Texaco enters his 60s, he's like, well, but Miyamoto's the boss, you know. still waiting for Sembigh to notice him. So let's move on to the production of Mario 3. And for some reason, I thought there were more interviews about this game in existence. I couldn't, I looked on Schmupplations, I looked on Glitterberry, I did some hardcore searching. There was one printed by Nintendo Power, which is a very surface level interview, and I'll talk more about that later. But the one I think is really interesting was one that was done for the release of the NES Classic.

And it astounds me that they were just holding on to these facts about this game for almost 30 years, and they just came out in this interview because... That's their M.O. No. Yes, exactly. It's just like, oh, we thought you should know this. Time is right. I think it is now time for you to learn the secrets of this game. You finally earned it with your loyalty.

We passed 20 million sales. You're allowed. God, how many copies did this game sell with virtual console? Who knows? So the strange origins of this game is that Mario 3 started as a game experienced from an isometric perspective. So, just imagine that for a minute.

No, thank you. They wanted to make it as different from Mario 1 as humanly possible because Japanese Mario 2 was basically Mario 1 plus extra stuff, plus more difficulty. They realized that they had rare, like, as their pet company, like a second party in America, right? They could have just said, rare, can you do this Mario game for us? Did they play any of those isometric games, though? I don't know how they would ever think it would be a good fit. The dream of an isometric Mario came true in Mario RPG and saw how good the platforming

that was. But I also like how there's like seven isometric sonic games. Oh, God, yeah. Funny how things are good. I'm a spot goes to Hollywood fan myself. Not really. Well, hearing how different it was or it was originally planned to be, it further solidified my fan theory that this really should just be called Super Mario Brothers, too.

Like, we got dokey dokey, Doki Duky Panicus, too. In Japan, they got Super Mario 1.5, basically. So, but meanwhile, this one, which should have been like the Zelda 2, this is the Zelda 2, or they wanted it to be that weird and different. Like, that's, that is my theory. It really feels like that. But Mario 2 for America was the weird one. It was weird, but not, yeah, it was weird, but it was weird in a different way.

It wasn't planned to be the weird Mario. Like, it was a weird Mario by happenstance. Like, let's just make this game a Mario. This one was made as different as possible from the ground up. Of course, we all know it didn't become an isometric game. But apparently the black and white checkered four that sort of tapers off into the perspective that's a remnant of that period of development

which I'm guessing didn't last long because they're like we can't do this like how would this I can't even I want to see a prototype I want to see how far they even got with this because I can't imagine this ever being a good game Well no there is basically an isometric Mario platformer

in Super Mario 3D land Oh you're right yeah right They should call it Super Mario 3D land stalker The difference is that had That has polygons, which makes it more convincing to render 3D. It does, but I don't know. Like, I feel like you could take that concept and it could work in, you know, with sprites and bitmaps.

I disagree violently, but we have to move on. No, debate me, Bob. Mario 3, no. I've hung up my debating heads. Damn it. I only debate for charity, and the price starts at $50,000. So Mario 3 was developed over the course of 2.5 years, which is an incredibly long time for an NES game. Like, I'm thinking of the games that took around 18 months to two years to

develop, and they're all like Dragon Quest or things like that. Like, a platformer did not take almost three years to develop, but it's basically because it's like, we want to put as many ideas as possible into this game, and we want to make them all implemented perfectly. We don't want an idea to come off the wrong way. Like, I feel like, and maybe Jeremy can weigh on this a bit, because I think he has some opinions on this. This feels like this team's, like, eight-bit finale before moving on to the Super Famicom. Do you think It was, in fact, their 8-bit finale. After this, they did move on to Super Famicom.

This game, they wrapped in 1988. Super Mario World launched in Japan in, I want to say, November 1990. That's right, yeah. And that game took about two and a half years to develop, so you do the math there. And basically, they wrapped this game and went immediately to figuring out how to make this new hardware work and how to design games that would take advantage of it and so on and so forth. Yeah, Super Mario 3 came out in 88, and that is in Japan. And that is when the development of the Super Famicom started, possibly earlier than that.

We don't really know. But at least in 1988, I mean, that's when these CD-ROM deals were struck and things like that. The crazy thing is this game came out in Japan, like, about a month after Super Mario Brothers 2 came out in the U.S. They could have just said, like, you know, instead of converting this game about cartoon characters into a Mario game, why don't we just do a simultaneous release for Mario 3 worldwide? But they didn't do that, which is very strange. Simultaneous releases were like great. They happened.

Super Mario Brothers was almost a simultaneous release. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And they didn't even have like a system in America when they released Mario. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but all you had to translate was a manual for Mario Wals. Yeah, I guess. But it's not like there was a ton of text in Mario 3.

I don't know. I just think it's interesting that like this very obvious direction that they could have taken, they didn't take, and they held back Mario 3 in the U.S. for two years, a year and a half, almost two years. I think they really saw an opportunity to milk fans in a healthy way. It's like we can give them two Mario games and make them wait. And then we can figure out how to build up to this next game with like marketing and with promotions. We'll talk more about that later.

I think Mario 3 was the most heavily marketed game Nintendo had done up to this point. Nintendo always takes the least obvious path. And this is them doing that way back when. Like it doesn't make any sense for them to have taken the approach they did with the U.S. releases. but I'm glad they did because I really love Mario 2 and I really love the ways that it enriched the Mario Universe, which you begin to see with Mario 3. Well, and let's not forget those chip shortages, too.

That's why we didn't hear right. Wink, wink, wink. Those really happened. So we're going to take a small break and we'll come back with the meat of this podcast, the actual game Mario 3. So, Super Mario Brothers 3, that's our topic for today. And it came out in Japan.

I don't know if these dates are accurate, by the way, because who knows at this point with this era of gaming. Japanese states are always placed to the date. That is true. Small country. I meant more the American. I guess there's not a lot of places to ship it in Japan. I mean, not a lot of distance to travel.

But it came out in late October of 88 in Japan and about 18 months later in the United States. And, I mean, 18 months is not much now as we're all rapidly dying old people. But when you're a kid, that is an unimaginable amount of time between an American and Japanese release. I mean, I was used to waiting that long for, like, again, RPG localizations. But as Jeremy said, like, they. release Mario 2, and they made us wait for Mario 3. And I was seeing coverage of Mario 3

around this time in magazines like EGM or something like that. I remember seeing this game being covered. Game Informer? Okay, yeah. It was definitely available to savvy gamers who knew how to get their hands on this. Yeah, I wasn't that advanced yet, even though as a kid. I wasn't know. I didn't know. It was still

going to be that it had been out for over a year. I just I only knew once the ad started in America. I mean, I was only seven when I was. I have friends who were like, they knew Mario 3 was out in Japan, like, when it came out, and they coveted it, and it, like, drove them obsessive. And I had no idea. I was like, okay, there's another Mario game coming at some point, but I hadn't really followed it that closely.

Just imagine, like, pre-Ebay days and pre-like, you could just live in Japan and run a business of mailing Mario 3 to people in America. I think lots of people did that, right? With those mail-order things, yeah. It's like, my hard game fan. And then, like, you'd send away for that stuff and you'd be waiting, like, a month of you're lucky to get that game.

Yeah, and, I mean, I only found out about this. I believe, like, is 1988 on the title screen in America, too? Like, 1988, 1980, Nintendo. Like, for some reason, I just ignored that, and it wasn't until I was reading, like, things like Kevin Gifford's website and things like that when I realized,

like, oh, this game actually is an 88 game, which is astounding for how sophisticated it is. I mean, 88 had some great games for Nintendo, but this seems way ahead of its time and for a lot of reasons. Before we go on to talk about the design of the game, I want to ask all of you guys when Mario 3 entered your life, and I'll go last. How about you, Ray?

When did you discover this game? How early were you on board? When did you get it? I think it was the wizard. But let me put that into context, because I got an NES in Christmas 88, and so I was pretty late, and I really not heard of video games,

before that, so I didn't even know about the shortages of Mario 2 and Zelda 2, because I didn't really know about those anyway. So, because I was a late comer, I just, and I didn't really like Mario that much either, so I was late to even getting Mario 2 because that was well after the shortage. But then, yeah, I think it was the wizard where that was just sort of revealed, and it's like, oh, well, yeah, now I'm in this for real. Now I love video games, now I love Mario games. You needed that Fred Savage endorsement.

Yeah, and then what happened, you know, but that period for, from my 88 and 89 was just like me totally diving into Nintendo games and discovering all this stuff like Mario and Ninja Guide and Mega Man and things

and so Mega Man 3 was also coming out that same year and so it was just like this double header of really big games that I couldn't wait for and just sort of like

really made a very good year for seven-year-old me. How about you, Henry? You know, I was also a latecomer to the NES. I got it in I would bet it was 88 or 80s. Let's say

and I just saw my next-door neighbor playing Super Mario Brothers, and it enraptured me like nothing ever had. And then I spent the next two years, like as the biggest Mario fanboy ever, like not just playing Super Mario Bros. all the time, which my family, like my mom and brother also super got into it, but buy Mario clothes, watching the cartoon religiously, like doing all these things. And so then when the marketing blitz began, I was so ready to give everything to Super Mario Bros. 3.

Like, so once it came out, I remember, I think it was the first time I ever bought just a game by itself. Because, like, we rented Super Mario 2. We didn't own Super Mario 2. I bought a game by itself and was just like the process of open the box, go through the manual. Open the little plastic bag. Yes. Read the safety instructions. So it hit me at the perfect time, and I played it to death.

Well, Jeremy is a bit older than us, so I assume he found out about it in the New York Times or something. I remember back in Art 3. He spat out as brandy and was like, by Jove, I must order this game. So, Jeremy, I'm kidding. He was also very British as a teenager. I didn't drink brandy. Oh, come on.

All right. Just vodka. Okay. When did you discover Mario 3? I don't actually remember. I mean, I wasn't really that excited about the game because, you know, I had a couple of friends who lived in the same block as me who owned NESs,

like in 1986. Like, they were really early adopters. And I played Mario. at their homes a lot. So by the time I got my NES, I was like, oh, it comes with Mario. That's exciting. I did pick up Mario 2 because it was so weird and exciting and interesting. And, like, Nintendo to Power did a really good job of selling me on it.

It was just, like, a very different-looking game. And I loved that. And then I saw Mario 3, and I was like, oh, it's just going back to the original Mario. But they gave it a clay cover. They, I mean, I think I first saw it in, like I said, Game Inform or something. I saw, like, some screenshots. and I don't know what it was, but there was something about the visuals

that didn't look like an NES game. It looked more like an EGA PC game. The colors were kind of flat and the palette seemed a little different than I was expecting from an NES game. It felt like, in a way, it felt kind of advanced. I was like, this doesn't seem like an NES game. This seems like it's kind of like should be on the next system.

But at the same time, I was like, it's still just Mario like running and jumping and you can't pick things up and all the enemies are like the enemies from the first game, so I don't know. But, you know, eventually I did see things like the giant world, and I guess that was when I was sold on it. There was a Play Choice 10 at the local university. I was there for some school event after hours, and I went to the arcade at the university to kill some time, and I saw Mario 3 playing on the Play Choice 10.

This was before I came out in the U.S. And I saw some dude playing Giant World, World 4, and I was just like, how can you do that? Yes. It shouldn't be happening. I saw it for like 10 seconds, but that was enough to just like sear into my brain. So when the game did come out, and I never saw the wizard. I've never seen it. You're not missing much.

I don't imagine. But like when it came out, then I felt like I needed to own it. And so it came out, I think February 1990, and my birthday was the next month and I got it for my birthday. So it turned out pretty well. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm the only one at this table who never owned the cartridge. I'm sure. I don't know how I found. found out about it, but I'm sure I was inundated with

the wizard, which I didn't see until I did the retronauts about it five years ago. So, you're the only one who saw the wizard, right? Yes. Okay. I didn't see the wizard as a kid either, but somehow it was on TV. I saw the clip of how to get

the whistle in the game. A bunch of these fake gamers here. I can't believe this. So that's how I knew how to get, I knew how to get the whistle when I played the game because it was like, oh yeah, I remember that clip from the wizard. Crouch down on this white blog. I can't get that. And I'm sure in the commercials they would show you like a second of Mario 3 to get you in the door. So I'm sure I saw it there.

And I'm sure Nintendo Power sent the message like, if you don't buy this game, you will have no friends. Your family will abandon you. Your pets will die because that was what Nintendo Power was all about. But I was a very savvy and shrewd child. And I didn't get very many games a year just because of like I didn't have a source of income. There was birthdays and Christmas and basically that's it. So I was like, hey, wait a minute. it all like night of my friends bought Mario 3

and I could just play it at their houses any time I want. I'm just going to play it there and buy something else. So that's how I experienced it. But that didn't stop me from buying the strategy guide and, you know, watching the cartoon and doing all this stuff. But I never actually owned a copy of the game until, well, I never. I mean, I bought it on virtual console for like everything Nintendo release. But I never own the cartridge.

I want to get you for Christmas. Ooh, yes. I'm sure those are incredibly rare. There's only a few million of them in the world. A few dozen million. Mintin box only. 18, wasn't it? Is that the number they gave?

18 million? I think I'd heard that at one point. Yeah, I think so. I think it was the high... Megabom. I think it was the highest selling non-packing NES game ever, I believe. So I just checked the sales of this game, and it sold 17 million copies, which... Right, that was pretty close.

And the Ineus sold 52 million units, right? Something like that, so that was basically a one-to-three install range. Pretty good attach rate. Yeah, I mean, if you look at, again, as I told you in multiple episodes, like, think about a game you like and think it's popular. Then look at the best-selling games ever. You'll realize that nobody plays the games you like. It's just like Minecraft, the Sims, Nintendo. I only like GTA-5.

GTA-5, yes. Those are the games. It does bum me out that Minecraft has, like, surpassed Wii sports now. Minecraft is good, though. I know. I'm an old man. I get it. It's infinite Legos.

It's what you always wanted, right? At least what I was wanted. I built the Legos. the way they told me to I was not a creative kid. And then I put them in the closet. So let's talk about the game itself. It came out on a three-megabit cartridge

with an MMC3 chip. And I definitely recommend the book I Am Error to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the inner workings of the NES and how it displayed graphics. But essentially this chip was engineered just to have a status bar on the screen. Was that its only function, Jeremy,

just to split the screen, have one stationary area. Well, it had the IRQ. feature, so you could do this, the split screen. I think you needed an MMC3 to be able to scroll diagonally. I could be mistaken about that. Yeah, this game scrolls in every direction, so that could aid it with that. Because, like, MMC1 games, I'm thinking correctly, stuff like Metroid and Kiddy Gris and so forth,

like those only scroll in one direction at a time. I think diagonal scrolling was something that you had to have the UMC3 for. And also, it had more, like, character memory and more graphical memories. So it could be a bigger game. There's a lot of things in this game. And it is a huge game. There are roughly 90 levels, give or take, depending on what you consider a level.

Most levels don't, I mean, there's a real change in level design for this game. Most levels are basically like a minute long if you're playing them well. And playing it again, I was like, I was astounded, like, some levels were just like, here's a very difficult 30 second challenge, and the goal is right after that.

It's like I was expecting a lot more, but they kind of know when to stop testing you. It's like, okay, you've already proven you can do this. You're allowed to leave now. It's not like, now do it the harder way. Now do it the very hard way. They like to be conservative with how much they reuse ideas, and I really respect that. It does help pat out the number.

It really does. It's kind of the approach they took with the shrines and Breath of the Wild. Like, here is a standalone bite-sized challenge. They feel like about half the size of a Mario one level. I don't know if I'm being too exaggerating with that. It depends on the stage. There are definitely some that are more expanses, but a lot of them are just like little quick bites. And you're right.

I mean, it does help keep things varied. Like, there are a few ideas that sort of resurface. Like, the giant world, I think, is a good way to sort of recontextualize previous challenges, such as the levels where, you know, the water rises and falls and there's a fish trying to jump. Big Bertha, I believe. Yeah. Like, that changes when you get to Giant World and you get like a different take on it, which is interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, each level is kind of built around, from a design standpoint, he feels like they're built around one or two ideas, and they just laser focus on that, and then it's you beat the level, you're on to the next idea. Those ideas don't recur too often. Not very often. Sometimes you'll see variants. Yeah, there's, you know, like a pipe maze or the Coroboshoe level,

or like one of the worlds in stage in World Four, the stages in World Four, the giant world, is like the same level with two different scales. There's like the small version of it, the normal sized version of it, and then you go through a door and you're like in the backside where everything's big. It's like the same level giant. Mario 64 also had the same idea. Yeah, I mean, every level in this game has a very strong thesis, I think.

I don't feel like any level is just like, here's some platforms we don't know. I feel like every level has like a way to sum it up. Like you have to do X and Y while this is happening. I feel they really thought out like every level needs to have a point. It can't just be random things floating. loading around to disturb Mario. But there are lots of changes to the Mario formula. And one of the biggest ones that I think is something that we take for granted is bouncing.

Because bouncing off of enemies was in Mario 1, but it was mainly just to bounce onto the next enemy. You got like a tiny boost. But this game, when you bounce off an enemy, you jump like three times higher into the air than you normally do, or maybe two times. And strategically bouncing off enemies is a new technique in this game that eventually becomes necessary to progress. Yeah, it's a matter of timing, though. It's not like you jump on enemy and, whoa, you springboard. You have to press jump at just the right time. Yeah.

And controlled bouncing, eventually, like I said, it becomes vital. And this would remain an element of the series for the 2D games, like this important controlled bouncing. Go back to Mario 1, if you haven't played it in a while, and you realize, like, wow, I don't get any air off these coupas. Like, I'm not jumping off a cup on two platform that often. Yeah, it, I think it was a magical moment for me where I felt the, like, boy, like, oh, wait, I'm jumping higher if I hold down the jump button.

Could I hit the next thing that's within jumping distance? Like, I think the first time that hit me was in one of the first or second worlds of the second worlds of the second world with the brick covered little gumbas. When I jumped on one of them like, oh, hey, I'm really flying up. There's another one over there. Can I hit it? All right, can hit the third one? And it's, it was magical. It's one of those things when I, when I see people playing and they're not doing that off of every enemy, I start to get, like, upset.

Like, what are you doing? It's like, aren't you holding down the B button all the time? Yeah, that too. It's like when I try to, it's like, no, you always hold the B button in. I don't think it's a coincidence that this concept, this mechanic debuted in the same game where you also gained the ability to control your descent. Yeah. And that's with a power up, so you can't always do it. but if you have that right power up, then you get great hang time and great control,

and you can really harness that to, you know, boost your life count. There was like this, I think World One Two or One Three where there's like an infinite number of Gumbas coming out of pipes. Yeah, spilling down hills. If you get the timing on that right, you can basically crank up your life count by just hopping on those guys. And by the time you run out of steam, you've already racked up like three or four extra lives. That's places like that. Yeah, that's one too. I never tried that, man, I should have done that.

It's really cool. You never heard of it? No, I never did that for free lives. God, first the wizard. Now you guys don't know the big secrets. I knew it. It was in the strategy guide, and they called the level Rolling Hills and Goomba Spills

because I read that strategy guy nine million times. There you go, yeah. So, yeah, other changes in this game, there's a lot they're doing new in this game. So we have a world map. Levels are numbered, but you don't necessarily have to progress in a linear order. Instead, you move around on a board game-style map

with secrets and shortcuts and mini-game. and wandering encounters, very different for the series. I believe in Mario 2, your progress was represented by nodes on, like, a page. There was, like, four nodes, and it would show you. So they were moving in this direction, but this is more like a board game kind of thing. You're not rolling dice, but you're moving between nodes with different sort of challenges and different sorts of activities on them itself. And that was a very new thing, and I think, I don't know if this is the first game to do this.

Can anyone think of another precedent? I was trying to figure it out. I was like, Adventure Island, no. I've been trialing, too, kind of did that. That was after this. No, not really, but it's clearly inspired by, like, RPGs and stuff. Yeah, for sure. The Lydid had the overworld.

Bionic Commando. Oh, that was also 88. It was before Mario, though. It was like May or so. They were devolved concurrently Jeremy. Yeah, I'm not going to say. Nintendo was like, oh, yes, Capcom, what a great idea. It could have been one of those Miyamoto moments.

It's like, I play Bionic Commando. I'm throwing all this away. We must make her game more like this. Put Hitler in it. Use your Bionic Arm and flip the tea table. I did read. I read this article on the making of Super Mario 3, which is more just a coalescing of a bunch of quotes from other things. But they definitely mentioned the nice way of putting it was Miyamoto was a perfectionist.

And the less nice way I was saying he'd throw out months of work because he had a new idea. And I could see him doing that late in it, I suppose. Yeah, actually. I just thought of precedent, actually. Oh, oh. from 1986, Ninja Kid by Tose and Bandai had a world map that you moved through

to access your levels. The levels would be placed randomly. Interesting. And it wasn't like a line-by-line kind of movement, but it was pretty much the same concept where you had to beat certain stages and then make your way to the finale. Oh, but wasn't that taken from Dragonbuster? Was it? Maybe. I'd forget what it came away.

We're all trying to one up each other. Not me. I'm hanging back. But that world map offered up so many new things for the Mario series, at least, because you didn't have to beat every stage anymore. You had the choice of going in the order you wanted, and it gave them way more chances to hide secrets and to also face not randomized enemies, but like the Hammer Brothers on the stage were they were either farther away or closer,

or you could also make them go to sleep, and you even got to see, you know, who beat what. It was even cooler in the two-player mode if you were playing with, like, a sibling like I would sometimes of like, oh, you couldn't beat one four. Well, I beat it, and now there's an M on it instead of an L, so I beat it first. L is for loser.

Go to hell. Two-player stuff was really good. Yeah, yeah. It was not just alternating. I mean, it was, but you could both be on the map. It's true. And Ray, you brought that up, and there's a built-in, really cool, a built-in version of Mario Brothers in this game.

because, so to, to, you know, proceed this, we have to talk about the goal challenges in that whenever you beat a stage, there's a roulette wheel sort of at the end or a roulette box. You either get a mushroom card, a fireflower card, or a star card. Ideally, you want to get three star cards, and you'll get a five up. But if you get any other matching cards, you'll get more than a one-up for collecting three. But if you're playing two-player, you can actually fight the other player or be friendly and trade cards with them. But most of the time, you would just steal their cards and try to kill them in that little mini-game. I never even thought of being friendly or sharing cards.

No, no, one's friendly at Mario Wars. Can I have the flower cards? Like, no, I'm taking all of your cards and I'm pushing you into a spiny. Goodbye. These are my cards. Yeah, so. And, I mean, that was a really cool built-in thing. It was, I mean, it's not like the entire Mario Brothers game.

It's essentially just one level that you play with somebody. But that's a really interesting mechanic that most people aren't going to even do, you know, with a two-player game or probably won't even find, really. I love the music of it too Like Oh yeah It's like the Hammer Brothers theme Right that they use? Yeah

So other stuff that it's new in this game We have auto scrolling levels For the first time Which a lot of people really really hates I don't know how you guys feel about them I know a lot of people I'm fine with them I think it's an interesting challenge But I know a lot of people are just like

Let me decide when to scroll please As a kid I didn't like them But that was my first time playing them As an adult now I was like oh I get these now It's cool I mean, I never, when I played a lot of Mario Maker and made stuff, I never made an auto-scrolling level. How do you feel about auto-scrolling levels, Jeremy?

I'm not in love with them. I mean, I think they work here because the levels are so brief that they don't have time to start to grate on you. It's true, yeah. But they are very memorization-based. Like, you need to know when to jump and, like, which path to take in order to get the most coins and so on and so forth, like, where enemies are going to appear. So to me, they're less interesting than, you know, more. more, like, player-controlled stages, but they're fine in moderation. I think I really hated just the idea of scrolling stages until, until Yoshi's Island.

When I played Yoshi's Island, I was like, well, I do like these, so I guess there are some good auto-scrolling stages. But, like, even the year before, mine card stages, which are also auto-scrolling, but of a different shade, like, I really hated them. Those used to be so ubiquitous. What happened to the great mining craze? Did it die out with 2D games? I mean, it was a big deal in Donkey Kong country tropical freeze.

They're like, no, we still got mine card stages. We're doing it. Those were fun, though. It was more like a threat than I promised. We'll bring them back. Don't make us bring them back. And in this game, we have seven semi-distinct bosses. We, of course, have the Kupa Kids.

And we have Bowser. Kupa Lings. I think it's interchangeable. I guess. I'm pretty sure it's interchangeable. I think they're, I think they're. I think they are officially Coupillings. I think Coupilings is a later edition,

so we don't think they're actually Bowser's children because they're not. Of course not. They're like Bowser's nephews or something. Sure. So Bowser has a sister or a brother. Well, maybe. I had canon on that.

Doug Bowser. My head canon on that is the KMAC just made them and that they're just magically produced clones, if you will. I wonder they're so mad all the time. I mean, clearly Bowser has access to magic. So just to magically create more Kupa lings or perhaps they're like upgraded Kupa troopers. Let me tell you about my parthenogenesis theory of Kupa propagation. Well, you see, they were exposed to the ooze, of course, and they became Mutant Ninja kupas, I guess.

Is that how it works? I loved all the Kupah Lings. Oh, I still love that. I love them. It made me very sad to see them disappear in the mid-90s, and then in the early 2000s, to see Bowser Jr. just appear and pretend that we, there were never other Cooper kids? Yeah, that never had. Like, why were they ashamed? I mean... But now there's no escape from them.

I love that. Have the racers in Mario Kart 8 are Cooper Kids. I don't want to escape them. Barry me and Cooper Kids. Bury me with Cuba Kids. So, oh, crap, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. What I really liked about the Kupilings then and now is the fact that they were given either, like, really dated names. in the English localization or really like obscure very sort of of the time references like Morton Downey Jr.

reference. That was a reference. What kid understands that reference in the year of our Lord 2017? There are basically two years when that reference could work and that game landed within those two years. But like even at the time, I was like, what is Wendy O.Cupa a reference to? Right, Wendy O. Williams. I guess we can go through all of them.

Larry, people thought it was Larry King for a while. but somebody interviewed the localizer. It's actually Larry David. It's not Larry David. But just like he looked like a Larry, so I named him Larry. That was the thought process. And Larry's my favorite. I don't know why.

I've got a little plush Larry. I think he's the cutest one. Morton Downey Cooper. Wait, Morton Downey Cooper. Morton Cooper Jr. is named after Morton Downy Jr. And he was a talk show host. Okay.

So that kills your theory that Kamek created them because there is a Morton Cooper someplace. If he is the junior, there is a Morton Cooper someplace. Darn it. Chew on that. The localizers ruin that. We should start a petition or something. Yeah, I was going to say that's not canon, but that's still his name now. That is his name.

So Wendyo Cupa, Wendyo Williams from, yeah, Wendyo Williams from the punk band, the Plasmatics, Ludwig von Cooper, of course, Beethoven. Yeah, that's the only one that's like a universal reference. Yeah, Roy Cooper, Roy Orbison, is it the sunglasses? That's somewhat less esoteric. I like that. Lemmy and Iggy, of course, Lemmy, last name, I forget. Kilmeister. Killmeister.

Well, awesome name. And Iggy Pop. Let me, he's dead, right? Yeah, he is. He recently died. So, he's up still hanging in there. And even there, we get progressive rock in Mario. He was the founding member of Hawkwind.

Don't. Iggy Pop has like a 90-year-old's head, but like a ripped 23-year-old's body. I don't know how it works, but heroin. It's kind of like carrot top. Heroin plus steroids, maybe. Who knows? Hey, and, well, side note, don't forget Boo Didley. That's right, Ray.

I wasn't sure if I dreamed that, but boo did. And my insane theory that I've trotted up before is, okay, number one question, was Bowser known as Bowser and Mario One? Or was he the Kupa King? I think so. I think in the movie, Bowser King of the Kupas. Yeah, I think he was Bowser in the manual. Yeah, because it's very convenient, he was always Bowser. In that Bowser is a member of Shawna-N-A, which actually works incredibly well with this kind of musical theming. Boo Didley, all the Kupa kids, except for Morton Downy Kupon.

No, though, it's famously a music dork. Like, he likes American music a lot. I would not be shocked, though. Shana, like, they're a cover band. They don't do originals. Is he known as Bowser in Japan? I forget the etymology, yeah. He's Kupa.

Yeah. So, yeah, this is all American. And I think Bowser is just, like, a dog's name or something, maybe. I don't know. But it's also an executive at Nintendo now. I like talking about this for ages, by the way. This is my favorite talk. They very quickly clipped all those names.

Like, Morton isn't Morton, doesn't Morton, He's a Martin Cooper Jr. He's just Morton Coupa now. Oh, they got rid of the junior? Oh, no. Maybe that is... The stories of theory. They're just booze and so on and so forth. Though also, I had read that they based the designs of the Cuba kids on members of the team. Like, they were kind of characters of team members on the game.

There was also a personal speaking of booze, like the... It actually is not as funny as stories I think they thought it was, but that the... The boo acting scary when you turn around and then covering its face, they said it was based on Tezica's wife, who was known as very, like, quiet. Oh, it was Tessica's wife, okay. Yeah, and then she was seen as very quiet and nice, except he had one day been, or he had been spending too long at the office for too long, and then he came home, and she, like, yelled at him about it.

He's like, oh, boy, this is your real face. I was like, well, it's an odd story of, like, of an angry spouse. Her justified rage created an enemy. But it's funny. This workaholism started and inspired us. Boo has a feminine name in Japan. Boo's are called Teresa in Japan. So that is just an odd name.

I guess I could probably look it up. I think Berdo is Catherine. Berdo is Catherine, yeah. So it's like, I don't know where that came from. Who knows? So I think we have to do some more research or visit Ancestry.com to find out where the Coupic Kids came from. So while we're doing that, here's a fun break.

If you take attention to how fast I talk while on Retronauts, you'd probably guess that I drink a lot of coffee. And if so, you guessed correctly, in fact, I need it to live. But for me, coffee isn't just a convenient caffeine source, it's got to taste good too. That said, after consuming two whole bags of the stuff recently, I can safely recommend Red Rooster Coffee. Red Rooster Coffee offers a unique and fun subscription service with options to have coffee delivered directly to your door every two to four weeks. Choose from a variety of options, including their delicious organic blends, their organic single origins, or the exciting microlot series. Red Rooster roast their beans the same day they ship, meaning you'll have the freshest coffee possible.

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Join us on a backseat right along every Tuesday starting in July. Be sure to tune in. At podcast.1.com, the Podcast One app, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts. From the classic Nintendo video game, it's the adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3. I better tell them, princess. The complete 26-episode collection, now available on a 3 DVD box. box set. Don't worry, my mushroom pal.

King Cooper is back. Me? Never. And this time he's brought the Cooper kids. I love being a Cooper. So it's up to Mario, Luigi, and Princess Toadstool to save the day. He can fix that. Special features include the series backstory, character and concept art, and more.

Get those gumbas back in that cage! The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3. Now on DVD. Hey, if you're listening to this podcast, thanks. You're rad. And you can make your listening experience even more rad by checking out the show on the new and improved Podcast One app. It offers built-in community options and even the ability to watch some podcasts in 360-degree

video form, including some upcoming Retronauts episodes. That's the closest you can get to sitting in the studio with us without having to worry about a restraining order. So check out the Podcast One app on iOS or Android, why don't you? Let me tell you about Pete. who loved hockey and always wanted to play in the NHL. Pete played since he was three and begged his mom to let him stay on the ice. Why, some nights, he even slept in his hockey skates.

Pete practiced and practiced until one day. When he was 47, Pete realized he just wasn't that good. So he threw his skates in the trash. But then he heard how Geico, proud partner of the NHL, could save him money on car insurance. So he switched and saved a bunch. So it all worked out. So we're back.

And before I get started, if you heard ads and no longer want to hear ads on retronauts, just go to patreon.com slash retronauts. And for $3 a month, if you sign up, you will get every podcast a week ahead of time and at a higher bit rate. And you get a private RSS feed that works with any podcast app or device that will just send our podcast directly to you. So I understand some people don't like ads and we offer a way to not get the ads in our podcast. But if you want to hear the podcast for free and don't mind ad, that's fine as well. I just want to throw that out there. So let's get started with talking more about Mario 3. And we left off talking about some of the things the game did new.

And they aren't formally called ghost houses yet, but there are these, like, ghost house style levels in Mario 3. They're working towards the ghost houses in Super Mario World. That would just be based around ghosts and ghost-style enemies. But there are some of these, like, little fortresses that are really, they feel like an evolution of these sort of maze-style balance. or levels in Mario 1, where they're more of like a navigation challenge than just getting to the end. They're more of like figure out how to get to the end, like which doors will get you there,

which maybe you go a different direction than you think you're supposed to go, things like that. I feel like they're really playing with what a 2D platforming level could be. I hate those more than auto-scrollers. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the one I really dislike is the one in the World 3 where it's like, here are 34 doors. All but one of them will dump you into the water.

And I always forget which door it is. I don't know why I haven't memorized it by now. I probably put that level like 50,000 times by now. Yeah, they were tricksy, definitely. You know, actually, I noticed, too, from going from one, if you go just from one to three, the big difference was having, like, water indoors or having, like, there were either, in one, there were, like, either underwater stages or not underwater, but having, like, pools of water you could go in and then hop out of into the ground.

That was a bit different. A mix of land and water. And another level type, which had never happened before in a Mario game, are airships. Instead of every level, final level taking place in a castle, which was traditionally what happened in Mario 1. These would be the airships of the Kupilings. And the cool part about this, well, I guess it's uncool if you die. The cool part about this is if you die, the airship can move across the map, potentially behind levels you haven't finished yet. And I don't know.

When I play Mario 3, I actually just... just do finish every level, just to get the one-ups and get all the nice Ms on the screen. But if you just want to rush to the airship, it's possible the airship would fly away behind a level, and you have to beat that level to access the final level again, which is a really cool idea. I like that thunder clap that kind of happens when it moves. Oh, yeah. It's, you only hear it because you died and it's moving, but still just hearing that like, clack. And the screen flashes or something, I think, yeah.

And the scrolling stages were, like, those were really fun. and it was a great way to do a slightly different version of the scrolling stage is like getting the up and down of a ship except it's in the air and I always remember even in the first level you have just cannons everywhere shooting at you but then they kind of

there's at least one I remember a cannibal will go down but then we'll like kind of then just go straight because the screen is moving the exact same way yeah like most of the enemies on these airships are just bullets and cannonballs being fired to you. There are those really annoying enemies that throw the wrenches. I don't know what they're called, but they're...

They're not Montemoles. No, I hate them because those wrenches are so small, and they always end up in the worst places. I think their name is Rocky? Rocky, it could be, yeah. Those guys are jerks up. And they keep popping back up, even when you're like, all right, I killed you, and they're like, nope, I'm still another one appeared right now.

There's a whole family under me. Get ready. Yeah, I mean, these are auto-scrolling, and I didn't measure this in any way, but these feel like they scroll slower than the other. their auto-scrolling stages because it's like, I just want to get past these bullets, move me, keep moving, keep moving. But it moves slow, and like Henry says, it bobs up and down. And they do a lot, they do a lot with this idea.

Like, no one of them, you basically have to move through, like, a gauntlet of, like, there's just cannons in, like, a row. You have to, like, go through them very strategically in order to not get hit. Well, in those airships, replaying it, it reminded me of how new Super Mario Brothers had, like rewritten my brain on these things because I got to the end and here's the pipe and I was like, oh, time to get that invisible

power up that's probably right over. Oh, wait yeah, they don't do that. You had to carry it with you, Henry. And speaking of power-ups, let's go over what the power-ups are in Mario 3. Of course, we have the trilogy of power-ups for Mario 1, of course, the mushroom, the fireflower, and

the Starman, and they all do the same things they do. I probably don't need to tell you what they do if you have played a video game before. Well, I liked the little differences with them. Well, only in the NES version and all the remakes, they stopped doing it. But I guess it was just a technical limitation. Your clothes do not turn white and red when you become fire, Mario. You are fiery.

You are orange, as orange as our president. But it was something they didn't do in the remake, so I think it was just they couldn't do it. They couldn't display those colors on screen as Mario. That part of those colors were not in the palette of whatever they were doing, I guess. that works. And then when you're Star Mario, you do friggin' somersaults in the air. You don't just do regular gym. That's so great. The somersaults are a nice touch. They didn't

have to do that. It just like, look how awesome he is. He's going to, like, freaking do somersaults. He's so powerful. There's a ton of things they didn't have to do, but they did. Yeah, I mean, that really is like the mission statement of this game. Like, we don't have to put all this stuff in, but we're going to. Well, it was just extra work to draw, draw

a new sprite of him, you know, tucked in for the spin instead of they could have, every one. Every everybody would have been fine if it was just the same jumping animation, but your colors changed. Yeah, it was a really nice surprise when you first get that first start. Yeah, I mean, it really feels like a Metroid reference because you're invincible when you do that spinning jump. I never thought of it like that. Yeah. Yeah. So another, another thing that I really like, something I didn't realize until I recently played the Famicom version of the game is that for the U.S. version, they changed power downs.

So when you're hit, you know, after you get a one up, or the, the, uh, the power. mushroom to super mushroom. In the Famicom version, it works just like Super Mario Bros. One where a single hit, well, no, when you have the fireflower, a single hit takes you down to Tiny Mario. But in the American version, if you have a fireflower or another power up, you just lose that power up, but you still stay super, which makes a very different game. It makes it easier.

It is. Yeah. And it's odd, especially in this era, Jeremy, that a game would be made easier for Americans. Usually it was the other way around because of the rental market. It's like, no, you will not beat this game in three days. We will crush you. You will memorize every part of it. But, yeah, in Mario World, it does follow the Japanese Mario 3's power down rules,

where if you are fire Mario or Cape Mario get hit once, you're small. You don't go back to big. But, yeah, that is an important change. I'm glad you pointed that out. But the star of the show for Mario 3 is the raccoon leave because it changed the game for platformers. Because primarily if you had a side-scrolling level, I mean, sorry, previously when you had a side-scrolling level in most games, almost every game, the top of the screen was the top of the screen.

There was no, that was basically the ceiling. There was nothing above that. Mario 3 changed that around where it's like, once you get this leaf, you can explore beyond what you see on the TV screen. There's stuff going on above that potentially, which that, I mean, as basic of an idea that sounds, like, that was kind of new. I mean, I'm going to say entirely new for me, at least, for a level that scrolled up to write that there were things happening above where the TV was showing me.

Well, I think it was good at those kind of levels are cohesive now because in Mario 1, it's just like you have to climb a vine and then do a straight transition to some other sub-level. You're in like Cloud World or whatever suddenly. No, I still liked in the first Mario game that like the ceiling was, if you went above the ceiling, then you were running through the numbers. Yeah. But in the World 1-1, Stage 1-1, teaches you everything about flying so well just through level design. And they give you that, they immediately teach you that you can now kick the shell over. It's not just jumping on the shell and sending it flying. Then you get the leaf and they give you a bunch of gumas in front of you to maybe try smacking with your tail.

And then once you've cleared the runway, they give you the perfect thing. Like, run to the end of this and jump. Hey, look at these coins. Keep going up for these coins. You might see something cool if you keep going up. It's really perfect design. And it's like that click with me as a kid. I didn't need to be told, like, it was just in front of me, and I figured it out.

It's like they go over a lot of the basic changes of this game really up front in that first level. And when you get to the end, when you get to the second secret in the air part and get to the coins with the number three, you're like, wow, this is so awesome. It does feel like them patting themselves in the back. Like, yes, you can fly now, and we made a third game. We are so great. So, yeah, I mean, this is the star of the show. This was why it was on the front cover. It was a big deal that Mario could fly.

like this was not a normal thing for this kind of game. And you have to put yourself back to 1990 to really remember that. I mean, we take it for granted again, and this was like a really important new thing for us. But moving on to other powerups, we have the frog suit, which is just absolute dog shit on land. I hate this thing, but it will help you. What's that, Ray? By design, dude. By design, yeah.

It's a frog. Frogs are, of course, they work well in water. I mean, this thing kicks ass underwater. And there are some levels I hold on to the frog suit for. just to get past levels because I think the swimming levels in Mario 3 are some of the more brutal levels, even more than Mario 1. So it should be explained

why the frog suit is so great underwater? Because you don't do like the sort of the balloon fight style swimming. You just basically put it up, down, left, and right to move in those directions. And holding in the

A button will let you just move in that one direction. So you can move not in a, what is that, a parabola or something? What is the curve? Is that, that's not a parabola? I don't know. But the way Mario swims naturally, where you, like, go up a little and then you float down, you go up a little, and you float back down.

Yeah, I guess it's a parabola. Yeah, it's a parabola. I don't do math here, but. And it made it way easier to avoid, you know, both, like, those static jellyfish and the bloopers with the tail of bloopers behind them. I hate those bastards. And I think in this game, I didn't try when I replayed the game, but I pretty sure you can uses the frog suit to go into certain pipes with currents coming out of them for like

really, really good treasures and things like that. I also think of Frog Mario because it was the only issue of the Super Mario 3 comic book I had when Valiant's comics, they got the big Nintendo license in America to do the Nintendo Comic Book System or Nintendo Comics System. I'm glad they stopped that naming scheme. It's like Nintendo Serial System, Nintendo Comics System. And so it launched alongside the Game Boy. So the biggest books were the Game Boy comic books,

but they also had a Super Mario 3 book. And in one storyline, Mario goes underwater in his frog suit and a big Bertha falls in love with him because he thinks he's a frog man. And also in that story, he eats a giant meatball and has a bad stomach egg. So this is supposed to teach the kids something, I guess? Like, interspecies love is wrong and don't overeat.

It was basically a rip-off of that part in the sword and the stone where the squirrel falls in love with the kids and thinks he's a squirrel. I see. I see. Well, Valiant, you tried. Or maybe you didn't. I didn't like those comics as a kid. They look ugly. Like, when you compare them to say Kotabe's official art, like,

well, you guys, you guys got a little off brand. Especially the manga that was in the Nintendo Power. Mario Coon? Yeah. Oh, no, sorry. Mario Coon's great, but whoever Charlie Nozawa, who did the manga for Nintendo Power. Japanese artists are better than American ones. Stuff. Always. Come on.

I mean. I know. I don't mean that. I salute the Japanese flag every morning, of course. The other power-up we have here is the Tanuki suit, which would teach American children what a Tanuki was, kind of. That's how we learned about testicles. I mean, gladly, Mario did not have any testicle-based abilities in this game. But this is one of the more Japanese things in Mario 3. I don't think anyone in 1990 in America knew what a Tanuki was, and it's actually not spelled in the way that's localized today or transliterated today. I think they localized it for Mario phonetically.

Because kids wouldn't know, like, you should be ooh, but if you spell it, read it out as... Dumb kids today would know that lying over a U would mean a long one. Listen, these kids eat fruit loops. They know what double O's mean. I do it all for Tanuki. Oh, come on. You're banned from saying that again. I love Tanuki Mario.

Raccoon Mario and Tanuki Mario, both of my favorites, like, aesthetically, power-ups they ever had. And I failed to save the exact quote, but I did look. this up, like Miyamoto said he was happy that Tanuki got to stay in, and the Tanuki Power Up came over because at first he thought it wasn't going to because it was so Japanese. It seemed like

he was implying he thought maybe Nintendo of America would ask them to change it. Yeah, localization. I mean, you turn into a Buddhist, like a statue. Yeah, Jizo. It's kind of... Yeah, Jizo. A little weird. I mean, not weird, but just like... It doesn't make sense if you don't know the history.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Buddhists an india called this figure a different name of course but I was looking up information about Jizo was the first time I realized like what this figure was and apparently he's the guardian of children and children who died before their parents like miscarry children so that's fun so here's something

this is kind of a little bit of a digression but something Henry mentioned earlier about the little line of like the bloopers with a little line of other bloopers behind them yeah and then you also have the gumbas that the flying paragumbas that release the baby Gumbas. And then Bowser has

the cupillings. So this is the first baby mania in Mario? I'm wondering if like between you know like Mario 1 and 3 like a lot of the development team started to have kids because they would have all kind of been around late 20s, early 30s. Like the red age to start having kids.

And they see they see children. And then you have like the statue that protects you know children who lose their parents. True. Yeah. I mean I guess I'm wondering if there's something there. I guess they saw children as annoying things that slow you down. No, but they've heard adults. I could see after the hit of the Famicom they probably

were just like, you know what, it is time to settle down. I should have kids. Pop them out. They could have had kids on the mind. You know, maybe not all negative emotions. Hey, I was just trying to make a joke. But the Tanuki reminds me of multiple

things I've read in interviews where they sneak in Japanese, well not sneak in, but they retain Japanese style things for other releases. They talked about it too in this amazing lot of ass with the original designers of the Game and Watch and how

the Octopus Game and Watch looks exactly like the way manga artists have drawn even before manga have drawn octopus faces. Like it is the stereotypical octopus face. You see those masks at like Japanese festivals too, those octopus masks? And

also in more recently in Super Mario 3D world when they put in the Lucky Cat stuff in it. I read in their what asser like, well, first we thought, well, Americans know what that is or will people outside Japan and China know what the Lucky Cat is, but they're like, eh, it's fun,

who cares? Yeah, and it should be mentioned that this power, so you hit down and B as a Tanuki, so Tanuki Mario has Raccoo Mario's powers. He can flip his tail, he can fly for a brief period of time, but hitting down and B turns into that statue, and I find this to be a fairly useless power. I just like how

Tanuku Mario looks. No, the Jizo is great. It can destroy things that can't normally be destroyed. It can, you can kill invincible elements of the state. I just find it's, I don't know, I just don't find it that useful in what I do with the game. It also kind of predates the butt-stomp ability because if you're like jump up in the air and then press down and B. You turn into the statue and it plummetes and crushes whatever it is. So it's like the Buddhist butt stop.

Basically. It is a proto-but-stop, but when they added the Tanuki suit to Super Mari 3-D land, And when they finally brought it back in 2011, they added that power up, but only for, like, the special Tanuki suit that you get in the second wave of the game. Oh, no wonder, I didn't play that part of the game. I know it's the best part. You have a bandana on in that version, and they had to make the rule of, like, if you can transform into this, then it can kill anything in that game, too. Like, oh, so it can kill the giant snakes that'll try to bite you. Like, yeah, okay, they can't.

And, boy, Bob, if you haven't played that part of 3D land, you haven't really thought of 3D land. The first part was too boring for me to finish. I'm sorry. Then you're wrong. Okay. It's not too boring. I'm okay with being wrong. I'm big enough to admit that I'm wrong.

But the second half is the real game that you would love. I'll get to it. I'll get to it digitally, and it's fine. I will play it eventually. But we should mention, like, why is the Tanuki turning into a statue? Well, in Japanese mythology, Tanuki are these, like, trickster animals with magical powers who can transform into things. I totally recommend the Ghibli movie Pompoco. It is a beautiful movie that made me cry.

I never thought a movie with incredibly well-randed animal testicles that made me cry, but it happens in Pompocos. Those scrotums are very well done by Takahata and his time. It's not as gross as it sounds, believe me. It's about, it's about animals versus man, and I'm rooting for the animals, frankly. And the last power-up is O.P. folks. It's the hammer suit. The legendary hammer suit that seemed like a lie when people would tell you about it without reading the strategy. You're like, no, you can't turn into a hammer,

Brother, because Oh, right, go ahead. Now, here's also where Mario gets the most Mega Man he's ever been. That's true. Takes the power of an enemy. He killed a Hammer Brother and crawled into a shell.

And this is, I mean, so Hammer Brothers suit, the only drawback is you can't slide, which is an odd drawback. I read a reason for that. Oh. That the reasoning would be that, so you can't slide, but

if you're on a slope and you wanted to block a fireball, they wanted to give you the option to do that instead of sliding down a slope. Cool, interesting. By ducking, you get into the invincible block mode instead of sliding. Yeah, so this, of course, you can throw hammers. Mario looks awesome.

He gets like a tan when he wears it. And this is a very well-hidden item. There are only five available in the game. Two of those are in mushroom houses, which I didn't mention before. Those are you go into mushroom house. There are three treasure chest. You open one and get that item. So there are two times you can get it at random, three times really well-hidden in

So this is an item that, like, once you have it, you have too much anxiety to be happy about keeping it. Like, somebody's going to hit me. I want to be Hammer Mario forever. I think Hammer Mario is a great example of this game's ability to use scarcity to great effect. Yeah. Because the hammer suit is so rare that it really feels special when you acquire it. And there's just so much about this game that you only see it like once or twice. And so it really sticks on you.

I mean, Korobosu is the obvious example. but the Hammer Brothers suit is another great example because it's, you know, it's not restricted to a single level like the Korobosu is, but, you know, it's still really hard to come by. And, yeah, like you said, like when I get the Hammer Brothers suit, I kind of freak out. I'm like, I can't lose this. And so, of course, then I end up immediately losing it. Yeah, it gave me a lot of childhood anxiety, too, that scarcity. The Tanuki suit, too, was not, it wasn't, it was also pretty rare. So if I ever got it, I'd be like, man, it'd be quite.

cool to take it in the stage. What if I get hit? Oh. Yeah. The Tanuki suit doesn't seem as special because it is kind of like just an amped up version of the most basic, you know, Mario 3 specific power up. But it's so much cuter. It's the cutest one.

He looks so fat and adorable in that Tanuki suit. I love it. And then they based an anime on that called Serial Experiments Lane. Oh, what? Wait, where's this coming from? Did I miss something? She just, like, the main character spends a lot of the series in like these teddy bear pajamas. Oh, you're right.

I watched that like 17 years ago and I didn't like it. It hasn't been a while. But Katabe's drawing of him was so cute. Just the one, they're still mid-run. It's just adorable. It's a great drawing. All the production art for this is fantastic. And they made him look super cute again when he came back in 3D land.

I've seen those renders. I like it. I think it made me sad that they turned away from the raccoon and the Tanuki suit so much. And that after this game and that they thought, no, we want a cape. And I like Cape Mario. Cape Mario is fine. I mean, we talked a lot about it in the Mario World episode, but there's, it's a, it's a skill for, like, it's a skill-based power up where it's like you must have skill to use this well. Where a raccoon Mario, it's like, no, you run and then you just jam on a button and you're flying.

Yeah, though as a kid, I think to the way, raccoons can fly or what is this, Tanukki? It kind of keyed into the whole, like, it is a stereotype, but the Japan's so crazy. Whoa, he touches a mushroom. him weird. I guess raccoons can fly in Japan, aren't they weird? It played into that, too. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, once we found out where these games came from, that stereotype popped up.

But one thing I didn't mention, and I did want to mention it now, is an item mechanic that, again, I think we forget about, is that, as with Mario 2, Mario can now hold and carry certain kinds of items, but every item he can carry either comes back to life and hurts him or dissolve. So I think they were worried about, like, technology getting in the world. the way, like, we can't have them carry this all the way because what if there are too many sprites on the screen or what if these things don't interact the way we want them to? So everything you can hold has a finite time.

You can hold it before you have to let go. And you can bring shells and stuff into pipes, but they disappear. Mario World would be like you can carry anything anywhere. You can throw it up in the air and catch it. Like, they would develop that idea much more in Mario World. Yeah, but you still can't quite cheat in either game that much if you, I mean, I think that's part of why they made those things finite because you might be able to cheat that you may be able to an earlier level that you didn't do and cheat all the way through it.

And they didn't really want to deal with that, I think. I like those blocks you can throw and how they teach you, you can throw them by you meet the enemy that picks them up and throws them. You're like, oh, I can throw these. That guy's a jerk, too. I think he's got a grudge or something. He looks unhappy. And also the ice blocks that you can melt. Like, there's a lot of different ways to interact with the stages in this game.

So other items we have are the star of level 5.3. I think we have are Karibu Shoe. Of course, that is the star of level 5.3. I think we all know which level to find that in. and that's basically a Gumba. Gumba in Japan is, by the way, a Curibo, which they, for some reason, two of the items have enemy names in it that they didn't translate. I find odd. Maybe they just missed it or something, but Kuriab Shoe is a Gumba Shoe,

and you get in it and you're like just a stomping death machine for an entire level, and there's an entire level built around using the shoe, which is great. It's not just a stomping death machine, but from, you know, from below you're an invincible stomping death machine. So the shoe allows you to jump on those black, Pacoon flowers. Yeah.

So, which would normally be, you know, it's just like a carpet of death. You can just hop across it and it's no big deal. Yeah. And it's so, but it also is super cute too, like with its wind-up toy aesthetic to it. It's got like a little key in the side.

Yeah, like a little wind-up key. And Mario just kind of peeks out over the top. It's cute. So we have Jue-Gem's Cloud. J-Gum. Ray. Tell me this ahead of time.

Jukum's cloud. It's a chip. It's a chif. Jugam is actually Lakitu, and Jugam is a Japanese, like, is it like a, like a, I'm thinking of the word, mythological, mythological tale or something like that, like a, like Momitaro or something. What's the word I'm looking for? Folklore. Folklore, there you go, yeah.

This is not important, though, but this allows you to skip past a level on the world map, but if you die in the level that you skip to, you go back to where you originally started. Not as useful as I would have liked to. No, no. Not like a P wing. The P wings are great. I mean, P wing is just like infinite P meter, just fly over a level if it's too hard for you. And you can do that with some of the airship levels if you just want to cheese it.

And some of the castle levels, like, have secrets and stuff that you can find. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I didn't do that with this play-through, but I do remember that. So the anchor, of course, I never use it. I never used it until reading it in your notes. I was like, oh, yeah, that anchor. I never use that thing.

So if you use it, it pins down the airship. So even if you die, it can't fly away. But if you just beat every stage, you don't have to worry about that. Hammer lets you break rocks on the world map. Another semi-useless item is the music box. It puts the Hammer Brothers to sleep on the world map. And it plays a little... I like the little lullaby version of the Mario one theme it plays.

It's really cute. It's a nice callback. But the hammer is actually very important in finding some secrets. Like, if you want in the water... Is it world four... World three, you can break a rocking. access to canoe that will bring you. Good old canoe and just take your

it's so cool. And I also love that one because that's the Japanese world where you know, the castle is on Japan. Is it in Kyoto? It's basically in Kyoto. Yeah. Yeah. So that's basically you're going to Nintendo's headquarters.

And the whistle, of course, of which there are two in the game? Are there two or three? There's at least three. Yeah. There's two in the first. World. Direct from Hyrule. Yes, exactly.

It plays the song that it plays when Link blows into it. I believe it's like an ocarina or whatever. And the hammer is straight from Zelda, too. You're right. Yeah, that's true. But those, yeah, I always get those first two, and then I never need a, I rarely need the third one, so I don't remember where that one is. Yeah.

The first one is in one three where you crouch on the white box and then you can go behind and go into the Secret Toad House. You go backstage, basically. And then in the first fortress, you get the, you bring up your P meter and fly to the top of the screen. Instead of going to fight Boomer, you then walk to the edge and go to the secret room. Yeah, I mean, that crouching on white blocks thing to turn, to go behind the scenes of, like, the stage is such a strange and magical thing. Like, when I was reading about how to get the whistle and I did it for the first time, I was like, oh, my God, like, I broke the game where I'm doing something special. I don't know.

But, I mean, this was basically put in there because there's no save game. no way to save your game in Mario 3 and it's a fairly large game so you can if you just want to skip to a world you can get these within the first five minutes of you playing but also it lets you play it on a higher difficulty level because if you warp right to

World 8 with five lives and zero items you're in for the hardest Mario 3 experience of your life I mean the ideal way to play this is to play every level so you have enough lives and items in order to take on World 8 which is very difficult I can never do World 8 without having

to play through everything first. I don't know about you guys. Yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't think I ever beat World Eight without at least going through half the worlds and then whistling there as a kid. And then when I played through it on the GBA remake, that's when I did. I just did every world that time. Yeah, I mean, they let you save anywhere you wanted to, right,

on the World Map? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I thought so. So the music is fantastic. More music than a Mario game would have up to this point. It's a reggae as has. Hell. The main overall theme has this, like, pokey, reggae beats, and they have, like, authentic, like, timpony

and, like, steel drum and stuff like that in this. Like, they, uh, Cochicondo worked really hard to make this a very, like, reggae style game. And it's such a unique sound for the Mario series. Although, I mean, um, we are in the, uh, what I would call earlier in retronauts, the cave mania era where it's like, everything's

tropical and there's cavemen and dinosaurs and just a tropical vibe. You don't necessarily need cavemen or anything. But this is sort of of falling into that era in the late 80s, early 90s. But I love the music in this game. We get the first athletic Mario theme, which would be a trend from here on now, where you have an

overall theme, which you hear in most levels, but the athletic theme is in levels that are more complicated, that move faster, that scroll automatically, and those are always my favorite themes in any Mario game, I think, the athletic themes. Yeah, when even I was a kid, I was kind of equating that music with steel drums. It's like, very

very easy to think of that. Yeah. The same way, like, I used to think of really Mario Music is like big band, and then they just sort of did that with 3D World. That's true, yeah, and we were like... I love that. Nintendo's been kind of brassy lately, haven't they? Yeah, thank God. I love it.

I love it, though. But as I've been reiterating throughout this episode, like, Variety is the main appeal of Mario 3. Like, every other game paled in comparison, even great games were a lot going on. Like, there was more going on in this game than I think, like, any platformer to date. I can't think of anything else that was this ambitious, had so much content. and that was due to just the talent and the time they worked on it and just like how important Mario was for Nintendo.

Yeah, after the success of Super Mario Brothers, I think they had a lot longer leash and they were able to make the choices of like, no, we're going to take as long as we will take longer on this. We won't be, we won't cut as much stuff as we would before. Like if we like this item, we're going to keep it in here. If we want to make this type of enemy, we'll make that type of enemy.

And definitely the size and variety of it shows you how much they didn't cut or how many ideas they had and wanted to mess around with. And just going more into the variety. I mean, we talked about how many things are going on in this game, but just some, like, macro things. So, like, world themes, every world has a distinct feel and theme with different tile sets. I mean, like... That means we can blame this game for why every other platformer from the...

then on had the ice world and the desert world and the lava world and the water world too and yeah it has all of the things that would eventually become like the the skeleton of every like of this kind of experience where it's like you need to meet these themes in order to have a platform or 2D or 3D um yeah so enemies we went over a lot of them more than any other Mario game just playing through it again I'm like oh I forgot about this enemy and I forgot about this enemy like I forgot about the enemy uh the candles where the flames come off the candles and and chase you. I'm like, I totally forgot about that. The ghost floors. Yeah, yeah, like the little

ghost floors. Oh, this is booed floors. Yeah, those are awesome. I also, you know, there's the chain chops and the flying chain chops that explode in fireworks. Yeah. But I also love the the little piranha plants, little white piranha plants that are almost like baby, like puppies or just baby version of animals. They're so cute.

They little hop after you, like, oh, you're kind of close. Hop, hop, hop. Like, it's, it's adorable. though they're also like, they can be annoying in groups and they can be dropped on you too. Did we mention the angry sun? The angry sun is a childhood trauma. You can kill him with a turtle shell, but he does come back. Yeah, like that is a great, I mean, like I didn't know what happened in that level. And when the sun came down on me, I was freaking out.

And then you get to World Eight and you're like, well, I'm safe from the sun here because it's dark, but you're wrong. Because there's the sun in pitch blackness. It's the gray sun. He's back. It's just a gritty reboot. I liked when they would shock you with stages that weren't a numbered stage, but it would be like the quicksand stage, like, well, wait, this doesn't have a number on it, but the stage all the same.

Yeah, and like in World Five, you start out on the surface of the Mario planet. One of the stages is just a tower. You climb this tower, and then once you get to the top, you're in a new set of levels. You can see. Skyworld. Yes, you can see the other world. world map really tiny like in like under you it's really cool it's so awesome and getting the like you're basically climbing the tower of battle into the sky to to punish humanity for their hubris

and again so we this is a major element of just the variety of this game platforms there are so many kinds of platforms they just go crazy like donut lifts and the platforms that act like seesaws and the platforms you get on they fall like a little line pathway like they would develop a lot of these into different ideas in Mario world but there are just so many kinds of platforms in this game. I can't remember. Are there springboards in Mario 3? I can't remember for the note blocks. Note blocks, yes.

And the way you bounce off of those is much more reliable and predictable than the awful springboards of Mario 1. I've always hated those. I don't know about you guys, but it's just like is this going to be the jump where I go really high? Oh, it's not. Okay. Even the note blocks are pretty tough. As I discovered when I

made some levels with note blocks and Mario Maker because people who don't know the series did not do well with that stage. I ended up changing it pretty considerably after letting my wife trial. Too much negative feedback. And again, level variety, we mentioned this, but your goal may always feel the same, but no two levels feel alike. A few are kind of similar, but there's always enough new going on where it's like every level you don't think like, oh, this is just like blah, blah, blah. Even with, you know, the levels where the land is sinking and rising and big berthas after

you, there's different stuff happening in the few versions of that you see. So, yeah, anything else about Mario 3 before we move on to our final Mario 3 related topic? I don't know if I missed anything. I think we've been pretty thorough. You know, I liked in World 8 really was quite a gauntlet to face at the end of the game. You really felt like you earned the end of the game if you could get through all that. Like that you don't even get, you go through two maps before you even get to a numbered world, which just like shows you how much it's kicking grabs.

And you cross that bridge and sometimes a hand comes out and grabs you. Yeah, that's really creepy. And I love the fact that, you know, the entirety of World Aid is basically Bowser's army that he, like his military force that he's mustering to take over the mushroom kingdom. It's like one level is like a tank, like a tank battalion, you're like jumping across tanks. Sort of like an airship thing. And then his ship, which you can just swim under the entire time if you want to just wuss out and be like, all right, I'm just swimming under the... I whist out. Yeah, no, I did that every time as a kid.

And the... But it was kind of, you know, like you were... arrive in Mordor. You never saw, you never went to Bowser's domain before in a Mario games. One does not simply walk into World 8. No, you have to start a whirlwind. Yeah, or

warp whistle. And that Bowser fight was a new thing. Like, they didn't, it was, it was the beginning of, your last Bowser fight will be different from all the other bosses you face kind of thing. It'll have a trick to it. I mean, I never figured out the trick. No, me neither. I was going to say, yeah, Ray,

I mean, it feels slightly unintuitive because in no other case are you invincible when you duck, but in this one boss fight, if you duck when Bowser jumps on you, you are invincible and that's how you get him to break through the rocks. It's true. I just, it's true. I just use timing and

scrambled out of the way. That's one way to do it. And like, when I would, I never got to World Aid as a kid and I would talk to other students and ask them about like, what's the Bowser fight like? And basically what they told me is you have to get

Bowser to kill himself. And I'm like, what is happening? at the end of Mario 3. Oh, it's like Mass Effect. God. Or like fallout or something. Yeah. But yeah. Take the knife.

Take the knife. So you're talking Bowser into suicide. No, actually, you basically have to cause him to break through the ground into the lava below and send him to a painful death. That's a kind of like hoisted by his own pittard ending that I feel like, Miyamoto prefers in those type of games that he doesn't, he doesn't want Mario to like, and then it ends with Mario killing his enemy. It's very Disney. Yeah. Disney heroes never kill the bad guy. The bad guy destroys himself.

Like Gaston hangs himself in Beauty and the Beast because he's... No, no, no. He falls off by trying this. Oh, no, I'm thinking of Tarzan. Yeah. Tarzan, it's the very grisly hanging on screen. Yeah, and like... You see the shadow.

That's going to give some kids some great dreams. Donkey Kong was like that, too. In a way. So, we're going to run out of time quickly, but I did want to go over some of the related media because, as I said in the beginning of this episode, the Nintendo really, they did not quite have the marketing savvy that Sega did with Sonic 2 and Sonic 1,

but they really were taking off in terms of just like, how do we get our message out outside of Nintendo Power? That's great. That's a great tool for marketing, but we need more than that. So we have, of course, The Wizard, the 1989 movie, came out in Christmas of that year. And I did a Retronauts episode about it in 2012. If you check the archive of Retronauts that we don't own at Archive.org,

you can find that episode. And as I said in that episode, I was astounded by the amount of times that Nintendo and video games weren't a major element. It's just like, they're kind of in the background of this mediocre family comedy, right? Yeah, no, I was on that episode, too. Yeah, Ray was on the episode. That's, you mean, they only say the word Nintendo once, so.

Yeah, and I mean, of course, the main appeal of that for kids is you saw Mario 3 at this video game Armageddon, is that what it's called? Video Armageddon, yeah. The Rift Tracks for this is great, though, if you don't want to watch it on your own. And if you're a fan of the Who, it's just Tommy, but. Without music or good acting. Instead of pinball, it's Double Dragon. Or drugs.

Yeah. But the funny thing about this movie is, of course, like, this game wasn't out. It was unveiled in the movie as a new challenge, but for some reason, the girl character knows the secrets of how to do it. Just like, what the hell? They were cheating. Usenet. Use net. Oh, God.

The dark web. They're on Quantum Link. So, of course, we also have, which I believe is the first for Nintendo, a McDonald's tie-in. Yeah. Yeah, that really got me, man. Before any sort of social media or messaging you could do to children, this was the way to get your game in front of kids associated with delicious junk food that programs their brain to like things. And we learned in the Sonic episode that Sonic 3 had to come out at a certain time because they made a deal with McDonald's. Like, they had to release their game.

And the toys you got for this, most of them were crappy. I brought the one toy that I had as a kid is the jumping cupa trooper. It's like you basically you squeeze a little valve and he kind of. of jumps. It's a paratrooper. One of those toys. One of those were soft served ice cream cones.

It is the most well-modeled of all four toys. Well, yeah, I think the one of Luigi on a cloud isn't bad. What does it do, though? It's probably Luigi burying his crotch in a cloud. Yeah. He has a wide stance, that's for sure. I mean, the Mario,

the hopping Mario one, I just ripped the coil off of it because I was like, well, I like him okay as the toy, but him it's too hard to play with with this dumb spring on it. That's one of the few Happy Meal toys outside of like Lego or something that was like the same thing that was already

existed prior. There was another like suction cup Poppy Mario, just not just not with the raccoon tail. Let's listen to the commercial it's going to be good. Mario. Look, Ronald. Mario's mystery block makes him big. And my magic

box. makes us lunch awesome great job what's in McDonald's happy meal one of four Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers three toys a Mario toy that jumps or an acrobatic little goomba

a pullback Luigi or a hopping cupa paratroopa one toy with each happy meal you buy So those were all the toys They basically all do some variation of a shitty hop Yeah yeah it's true I guess I guess that was the one idea that went with like Oh yeah jumping Mario's about jumping

everything jumps in the game. Here's a funny thing. I live in San Jose now, but like 27 years ago I went there to visit my sister when she lived there. And like on one of the last days, this was like in the summer, right, or spring whenever that happy meal came out. It's like I've had to find out about that happy meal by seeing it in someone else's car in the parking lot. Immediately freaked the fuck out and need to have all that stuff. And then we had to go back home. I was going to say that was Little Ray Barnhold's first B&E.

I was a happy meal kid I loved all the happy meals But also it was that So we definitely collected them But it was also that my mom I realized now my mom had a collector's obsession with them Like she would I think I

As a kid thought of like How nice of my mom to try to get me Every Happy Meal toy by buying Happy Meals But I think it was just an obsession of her own too Dark Secret And she now calls it my inheritance It's just this like giant bag of all these doubles of happy meal toys.

I have a garbage bag of baby Kermit's on a skateboard, Henry? Yeah. That's her inheritance. And all the fraggles and all the Bambi characters and all the transforming ones. So to go through a few of the other things before we wrap up, we have the awkwardly named tying cartoon. It's literally called the Adventures of Super Mario Brothers 3, like the adventures of product you should buy. Yes, yes. And look, I loved that one.

Listen, yeah, I mean. It is the best of the Deke trilogy. It really is. Super Show is just trash where they just go like, we're in Star Wars World, we're in Sabarion World. And then meanwhile in the...

It's Billy the Cupa. And then in Super Mario World, it's just too cave-manny and ugly. Yeah. This one was the one where they stuck the closest to the character designs and the worlds and the enemies. It still has very stupid things.

It's bad, yeah. It's still bad, right? I forget the actor's name who did Mario Voice, but he's the one true Mario Voice, and I won't hear otherwise. Oh, I like Captain Liu, even though that was one of the worst cartoons. I like Captain Liu.

his voice. And, well, also, it was when they finally were coloring Maria's hair as brown under his hat instead of black, which they did in Super Show. And that was just a change in the three, actually, no, in two in the official art in two. All right. I get it. He changes it. But I think, I think the most, okay, so Morton Cooper Jr. puts us in time in 1990. What even puts us more in time is the, of course, infamous episode in which Millie Vanilli play a major role. And if you want to see the Mario Brothers Rescue Millie Vanilli from King Coupa, it's on YouTube. It happens.

You can go find it yourself because I refuse to play it on this show. Well, you do have to, and you do have to watch it on YouTube because the one out of the DVD, they didn't pay the song rights for the Millie Vanilli songs. And I doubt that's actually Millie and Vanilli doing their own voices. I think it's just cartoon voice actors doing German accents. You also get to see the princess in like that 90s sweater. Yes. Okay, Princess Peach wearing a baggy Millie Vanilli sweater for an entire episode. I mean, this happened.

It's real. and I'm fascinated with it. She is Robin Fab's biggest fans. But I think the, I do believe just because of the production time, the episode aired after they were publicly shame. I'm pretty sure, yeah. But it's like, I think we've come to understand like, oh, that's all pop music. We were just ignorance. Yes.

No one is actually singing with their real voice. Well, those were just a couple of poor, poor unfortunate male models who, their album got too popular. It succeeded too well. Then they just had to be those guys. Hey, Ashley Simpson survived the same thing. It could have been worse. It could have been a Mario crossover with Jordy. Jordy, oh, the rapping French baby?

It's tough to be a baby. That would have been the child theme of Mario 3-2. I wish I didn't know this. We got lucky. Oh, and in the cartoon, the kid names are all different because they hadn't been localized when production began on the cartoon. Yeah, actually, the kids are not named in Japan. They have no names.

I mean, I guess they do now. They have the American localized names, but America just name them. And that was it. And then the... But Deek had to name them first when making adventures of Mario. Blinky, Blinky, Clives. It's like hip-hop and Coutypie and... Dumb, really dumb things.

And the last thing I'll talk about, before you wrap up, are the ports. There's a few, of course, this is included in the Lost Levels. I like this version. Luigi gets his own sprite for the first time after Mario 2. The Luigi Sprite in Mario World and in Mario 3 is just Mario of a different color. But I like this version of the game. I don't know if you guys, I know people have a problem with the Mario One version in Lost Levels, but I like how, oh, sorry, like, sorry, the Mario 1 version in All Stars, but I like how lush Mario 3 looks in the Lost Love, in All Stars. The Lost All Stars. No, it's, it's very pretty in All Stars. I like the, they put a ton of work into it that you can see on screen and all the, they basically just made the games again.

It's all more shading, basically. Yeah, they just like airbrushed everybody a little bit. Well, and also that Mario was not a, he wasn't, because of the colors available on the Super Nias, he wasn't just a three-toned character of just red, black, and fleshed him. He had blue overalls and everything. Wait, I have to challenge you for a second. I don't think Luigi got his on Sprite in that until the GBA version. No, he has it in Lost Levels. I'm sorry, he had in All-Stars. I don't know why keep doing that.

But I played as Luigi on purpose in that game because I'm like, this is a new Luigi Sprite, oh, my God. All right, my mistake. It's okay. And the other version of this, I'm aware. of is Super Mario Advance 4, which had e-reader support, and you could buy these wacky-ass levels that included gimmicks from other games, like giant turnips from Mario 2 and stuff like that. I've never played these levels. I'm sure somebody, like, ROM hack them into a ROM.

You can buy the virtual console version for Wii U, and it has the, the, they put in all of them all included, yeah. I'm doing that. Like, if you don't own that, you need to get it. As much as I don't like how they have to crop the screen for. for GBA. I want those levels. Some of those cards were really hard to get.

I think some of them were like Walmart exclusive. Is that right? Yeah. And some of them, I think Europe didn't even get all of them. Yeah. So having them all together, like when that came out, it was, I can't believe Nintendo is doing something genuinely like good like this.

I can't wait for them to put that on the Switch in like 2022. If that ever happens. So you're ready to move on from Switch. That is our, oh, go ahead. No, no. I, yeah, I loved playing it again on advance four. It was just, the numbering was weird, but the advanced games gave you another chance to re-explore Mario games,

except now they were perfect because Charles Martinet was shouting at you the entire time you played. That's what we all wanted, I think. Yeah, you can't turn it off because go to hell. You can hear these voices. So, yeah, that was our Mario 3 episode. I'm glad I got to do this. I like to revisit these games that we all treasure just to rediscover all the great things in them. When I'm playing this again over the last week, I was like, oh, I forgot about this.

I forgot about that. Oh, my God, this is great. Like, revisiting these games is a good way to remember why we love them. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I love doing these types of episodes. I'll do more in the future. So let me know if you like it, and I will keep on keeping on. So let's wrap up, Jeremy, where can we find you?

On Twitter as Gamesbyte and at Retronauts.com. I've heard of that website. Anne Henry. How about you? I am H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter. You can follow me there. I also do a podcast every week. week with Bob Mackey, it is Talking Simpsons, where we go chronologically through every episode

The Simpsons. You can support that at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And I also did, I forgot to use this quote, but I wanted to bring it up real quick here that some people, there's an apocryphal story that Miyamoto said that he was disappointed in this game. Yeah. It's not exactly, this was in a Time magazine interview. I look back and play some of these games and there are a lot of places where, to be honest, I'm a little embarrassed. I look at Super Mario 3 and feel like what this was it this was what we thought was good enough

that being said this is a part people don't go to that being said I do have new understandings of that work the balance in that game is what it needed to be at that time it really was and so even seeing all the limitations I'm very happy with what we created and I wouldn't change it

I'm going to say fake news lies slander Ray where can we find you I'm on Twitter RDB AAA and it's all I got As for me, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, as Henry said. We're on Talking Simpsons together every week. And also, please, please, please give to our Patreon. As I said, after the break, for $3 a month, you can get these episodes a week ahead of time, add free, add at a higher bitrate,

and you get a private feed that plugs into any podcast player or app. So that's one incentive. Go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. There are tiers above that. If you want to give more, there are things like zines and t-shirts. or if you just want to give a dollar a month to say, hey, guys, here's a little tip. Thanks for doing the show. Any small amount works.

And if all of you guys out there gave us $1 a month, we could do all kinds of crazy awesome stuff. So please consider giving to us at patreon.com slash retronauts. That's it for us this week. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. See you then. Technology Truths, brought to you by Geico. Technology Truth. You will certainly send any text about your supervisor to your supervisor.

What's with Janet Spangs? Did she lose a bet with a weed whacker? L-O-L and scent. wait no no no no no truth it's so easy to switch and save on car insurance at guyco dot com janet i think my phone was hacked or something geico 15 minutes could save you 15% or more the muller report i'm edonogh with an apy news minute president trump was asked at the white house if special counsel robert muller's russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town i guess from what i understand that will be totally up to the attorney general Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it.

In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.