Is Nintendo’s 1983 Arcade ClassicĪs far as Nintendo was concerned, then, the Super Mario brand of running, jumping, and hitting blocks was still open to reinterpretation – especially with the imminent launch of the Game Boy, which effectively opened up a largely unexplored vista for the entire games industry.
Eurogamer’s Chris Schilling, in his retrospective, regarded the game as an act of in-house rebellion, if not outright sabotage.įurther Reading: Why Mario Bros. But if later critiques of Super Mario Land are anything to go by, it’s generally regarded as an aberration – an ill-formed semi-sequel that doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the franchise’s mainline titles from around the period, like Super Mario Bros. At the time, Super Mario Land sold millions of copies, and along with Tetris, was one of the Game Boy’s must-have titles. It was as though, in their desire to find a new theme for Mario’s first proper handheld platformer outing (forgetting those simplistic Game & Watchtitles earlier in the decade), Nintendo turned to the oddball ideas of author Erich Von Daniken, who posited that everything from the ancient pyramids to bananas were somehow connected to alien visitations. It seemed desperately strange then, and strange now, that Nintendo’s flagship action franchise would delve into the further reaches of Ufology – but then again, it was all par for the course in a game that also features Egyptian pyramids, giant Maoi heads from Easter Island, and undersea levels where flying saucers sit on the ocean floor. Right at the start of world 2-1, there’s one hovering right in the middle of the screen, with its round portholes, unmistakable shape – like a dustbin lid – and familiar bulbous “landing gear” jutting out of the bottom. More than four decades later, Adamski’s flying saucers landed in a highly unexpected venue: Super Mario Land. The images were widely printed in newspapers and magazines, and the ship depicted in them – saucer-shaped, with a domed roof and round windows – did much to define the look of unidentified flying objects at the height of the ’40s and ’50s UFO flap. In 1947, a 60-something-year-old American named George Adamski took the first of several photos of what he claimed was a Venusian Scout Ship – a mysterious craft from another world.
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