Bite-Sized Game History: Disc Room’s Future History, 007 Blood Stone’s Economic Box Art, and Super Mario 64’s Wild Manga

Surprise… Surprise…

Today’s Bite-Sized Game History is all about the strange little surprises you stumble across when you’re exploring where a game came from. Those surprises can be a clever bit of programming, an economical bit of marketing, or an absolutely wild adaptation of a game that you thought you knew everything about.

Find out which is which after the break.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

It’s 2023 and so many great sci-fi stories now take place in the past. Back to the Future Part II… 2015. The Running Man… 2017. Blade Runner… 2019. But the developers have made sure that Disc Room will never join their ranks.

A few years ago, Designer Jan Willem Nijman shared that Disc Room was built to use your device’s internal clock to increment the year in the opening title card so that the game always takes place 69 years in the future. Originally, it said this:

In 2089, a giant disc is discovered in orbit of Jupiter. A crew of international scientists is sent to investigate.

But if you load up the game today, that first sentence will read “In 2091…”

You really have to hand it to Disc Room‘s development team (who are credited as Terri, Dose, Kitty, and JW), not only is the game an excellent bullet hell-style dodge ’em up, but it also solves one of sci-fi’s lingering problems.

A publisher has several options when deciding what the cover to their game should look like.

If you’re Electronic Arts and you’re trying to put a face to the latest edition of the Madden franchise, you pick a (possibly cursed) player, invite a bunch of reporters, call up sone photographers, and turn the whole thing into a media circus. But if this is 1997 and you’re Nintendo, you take GoldenEye’s fantastic film poster and inadvertently give Pierce Brosnan an extrawide face when you try to recreate it (once you see it, you can’t unsee it).

Now let’s split the difference. What if it’s 2010 and you’re Activision and you want to promote James Bond 007: Blood Stone? Of course, you’re going to want to get in touch with series star Daniel Craig. But what do you have him do? A steely-eyed glance at the camera in some studio? Nah. Maybe a suave spy-like pose with a gun would be better? Yes, that’s the ticket.

Or instead, you could just ask someone at Eon Productions to fax over a behind-the-scenes photo of Craig checking a prop gun during the filming of 2008’s Quantum of Solace. Take a look at which option Activision went with in this tweet from game journalist and podcast host Jon Cartwright.

Finally, no amount of preamble can prepare you for what you’re about to see here.

Supper Mario Broth recently shared a peek at 4koma Gag Battle: Super Mario 64, a manga adaptation of the beloved platformer that was originally published in Japan in 1996. In the panel, you’ll see that the games mushrooms were spawned not from breaking blocks, but literally growing out of the dead bodies of all the Marios that lost their 1-UP before you.

I don’t know what to do with this information.

Thanks to Jan Willem Nijman, Jon Cartwright, and Supper Mario Broth for posting these bite-sized history lessons. And if you’re interested in more game trivia, be sure to follow me on Twitter.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.