Tag: Super Mario Bros.

“The Resties Required Reading List” Includes the 25 Games You Need to Play to Understand the History of Games

Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick host The Besties, a podcast where they talk about “the best game of the week” every week.

The Besties is part of the sprawling McElroy media empire, but episodes produced solely by the non-McElroy members of the show appear as a spinoff show known as The Resties, and for the last 18 months they’ve been sporadically adding games to “The Resties Required Reading List“.

Not a Best Games list, the “Required Reading List” is a collection of titles that serve as the best introduction to the wider world of video games. Plante likes to refer to it as “a syllabus for Video Games 101” and further described the project like this…

Our goal is to curate and contextualize a “must play” list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. These aren’t the best games or even our favorite games. They’re the games that should be experienced by everyone who wants a fundamental appreciation of the medium. They’re the games that will give you a richer connection with every other game you play.

Plante and Frushtick split the “Required Reading List” into eight episodes, each covering a five-year span that lands somewhere between 1980 and 2020. Within these smaller chunks of time they picked two-to-four games that best represent the era and a specific corner of gaming they wanted to highlight. In the end, 28 games made it through these mini-debates before the hosts cut three titles to reach their 25-game goal. Counter-Strike (from the 2000-2004 episode), along with Hearthstone and Spelunky HD (both from the 2010-2014 episode) ultimately ended up on the chopping block.

So which games did make the grade? You’ll find all the foundational classics from the 1980s (Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda), as well as the modern games that are currently moving the needle (Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Outer Wilds). In between there’s Doom (1993), Pokemon Red/Blue, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Minecraft, and more than a dozen others.

Wanting to argue with a Best Games list is the most natural reaction in the world, but it’s hard to quibble with any of the choices on “The Resties Required Reading List” as the games you need to play to best understand the history of games. Or, to steal a phrase from one of The Resties, the “Required Reading List” is a way of “thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators”.

You can see all 25 games from “The Resties Required Reading List” after the break.

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Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Bros. Theme” Added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is still dragging their feet on formally adopting Henry Lowood’s Game Canon proposal, but that didn’t stop the institution from including a piece of music from a video game for the first time as part of the National Recording Registry’s Class of 2023.

While a case could certainly be made for “Korobeiniki” from Tetris, this honor actually belongs to Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Bros. Theme,” which was selected for the list by the National Recording Preservation Board. Alongside the rest of this year’s inductees, the board believes that the recording (officially known as the “Ground Theme”) is a perfect example of an “audio treasure worthy of preservation for all time based on its cultural, historical or aesthetic importance.”

The tune was originally released in 1985 alongside Super Mario Bros., and the Library of Congress believes that it is “perhaps the most recognizable video game theme in history.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment, or with its description as a “jaunty” piece of music with a “Latin-influenced melody.”

It’s hard to believe that Koji Kondo was just 23 years old when he created this iconic theme, and he seems genuinely touched by its inclusion in the National Recording Registry:

“The amount of data that we could use for music and sound effects was extremely small, so I really had to be very innovative and make full use of the musical and programming ingenuity that we had at the time,” he said through an interpreter in a recent interview. “I used all sorts of genres that matched what was happening on screen. We had jingles to encourage players to try again after getting a ‘game over,’ fanfares to congratulate them for reaching goals, and pieces that sped up when the time remaining grew short.”

[…]

“Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little bit difficult to believe.”

The “Super Mario Bros. Theme” will be inducted into the National Recording Registry this year alongside a lot of other great music, including “Imagine” by John Lennon, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics, “Like a Virgin” by Madonna, and “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey.

Speedrunner Niftski Sets New “Any Percentage” World Record of 4:54.798 for Super Mario Bros.

The speedrunners attempting to bend Super Mario Bros. to their will continue to inch closer to completing a perfect run. Niftski, the current recordholder for an “Any Percentage” completion of the game, bested his own mark yesterday.

The speedrunner shaved a few frames off his previous time to set a new World Record of four minutes and 54.798 seconds. You can watch the entire thing, which includes a variety of nigh-impossible glitches and warps to save time, right here:

Niftski’s main competition for the Super Mario Bros. crown is Miniland, and the two speedrunners have been locked in a back-and-forth battle for the right to claim the World Record for the better part of two years.

Miniland set the initial pace in February 2021 with an “Any Percentage” completion time of four minutes and 55.23 seconds. Niftski answered two months later with his own time of four minutes and 54.948 seconds.

Miniland roared back in November by completing Super Mario Bros. in just four minutes and 54.914 seconds, but Niftski has been in control of the World Record in the months since after posting a time of four minutes and 54.881 seconds in December.

Both speedrunners are chasing the chance to complete a perfect run of Super Mario Bros., which is currently pegged at four minutes and 54.265 seconds. Known within the speedrunning community as a Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS), this time is generated by a program that stitches together the individual frames that comprise the optimal path through the game.

Niftski and Miniland post updates on their progress to YouTube, so be sure to follow them to see who will improve upon the record (and get closer to perfection) in the future.

Three Mini-Documentaries for Mario Day

It’s March 10th, which can also be written as MAR-10, which means that it’s Mario Day, an annual celebration of Nintendo’s mustachioed plumber.

Like Disney and Star Wars Day, the consolemaker has embraced this fan-driven holiday, and it’s likely that some kind of major announcement will happen later today (the smart money is on the first trailer for the upcoming Super Bros. Mario movie).

But you need to get into the proper headspace to truly enjoy the holiday, so sit back and enjoy this trio of mini-documentaries about the man they call Mario.

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See the Bracket (and Winner) for IGN’s “Best Video Game of All Time” Tournament

IGN’s editors and contributors have produced multiple Best Games lists over the last 20 years (the most recent, the “Top 100 Video Games of All Time,” was published in 2019), but they’re doing something a little different with their “Best Video Game of All Time Bracket.”

Beginning today, IGN’s readers will guide the process by voting in a March Madness-style tournament that features 64 of “the very best” games, as selected by IGN staff.

To build the bracket, games were sorted randomly into four different regions, and then seeded by IGN’s editors. Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, Valve’s Portal 2, Nintendo’s Super Mario World, and Nintendo’s Super Metroid were the #1 seeds in each region, but voters will have to make some hard choices in this first round.

I mean, how do you choose between The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? Or Halo 2 and Mass Effect 2? Or Street Fighter II and Pokemon Yellow? Or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Final Fantasy VII?

Let’s take a look at the full seeding…

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Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and the Suspected Fraud at the Center of the Graded Games Market

The market for retro games has exploded exponentially in the last few years, with the record for the price paid for a single game rising steadily from just over $30,000 in July 2017 to $114,000 in July 2020, $660,000 in April 2021, and $1,560,000 in July 2021. Earlier this month the record climbed again to $2,000,000.

It would be easy to chalk this phenomenon up to an aging base of collectors ready to spend their hard-earned dollars on something they could never obtain as children. After all, you saw the same thing with comic books and baseball cards in the 1980s and 1990s.

But something else might be going on here…

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Rally, a “Stock Market for Collectibles,” Sells Their Copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 Million

Rally, a “stock market of collectibles,” made a splashy entrance into the world of high-value game collecting during the Summer of 2020 when they purchased a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros. for $140,000.

After acquiring the game (which received a 9.8 A+ grade from Wata Games), the company sold 3,000 “shares” in the collectible cartridge to investors for $50 apiece

Rally’s $140,000 purchase set a record for a single game sale at the time, but it’s been eclipsed multiple times in the past year, including twice just in the last month. That’s when this merry-go-round of motivated sellers and deep-pocketed buyers culminated in sales of $870,000 (for a copy of The Legend of Zelda) and $1.56 million (for a copy of Super Mario 64).

But now Rally gets to sit on the top of the mountain for a little while, and that’s because the game’s shareholders have decided to sell their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 million to a private collector:

According to The New York Times, each shareholder will receive roughly $475 per share after the sale is completed. That’s honestly a pretty great return on their initial investment.

Someone Found a Director’s Cut of 1993’s Super Mario Bros. Movie on an Old VHS Tape

That headline might sound like some kind of bizarre April Fool’s Day hoax, but I promise, every word of it is true. Someone (two someones, actually) found an extended director’s cut of the Super Mario Bros. movie adaptation from 1993 on an old VHS tape.

So who managed to sniff out such an odd piece of cinematic history? That would be Ryan Hoss and Steven Applebaum, the operators of Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive and the caretakers of an extensive collection of production material related to the film.

Trust the fungus and read on to learn more about Super Mario Bros.‘s almost-mythic place in the video game movie canon and how this extended cut will give fans a glimpse at a version of the movie that’s even crazier than what we got in 1993…

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Super Mario Bros. Speedrunners Inch Closer to Perfect Run With Record Time of 4:54.948 from Niftski

Thanks to the wonders of emulation software, speedrunners have discovered that the optimal path through Super Mario Bros. can be completed in just four minutes and 54.032 seconds. This is known as a “Tool Assisted Speedrun” (TAS), which breaks the gameplay down into individual frames and reassembles them to determine exactly what a perfect run looks like.

Normally, human players can’t get compete with the times posted by a TAS, but the speedrunning community is doing their best to match the machines.

Case in point, Niftski just broke the 4:55 barrier for an “Any Percentage” run by completing Super Mario Bros. in a blistering four minutes and 54.948 seconds. Kyle Orland compared this feat to the four-minute mile on Ars Technica in a great primer on the various tricks and glitches the speedrunner exploited to secure the record.

While Niftski is now the owner of the fastest time for Super Mario Bros., his achievement does come with an asterisk. Instead of using an NES console and controller, he set the record using a keyboard attached to a PC running an emulated version of the game. The speedrunning community as a whole considers that a legal option, but many individual speedrunners prefer to stick with original hardware.

The previous “Any Percentage” record for Super Mario Bros. was four minutes and 55.23 seconds, which was set by Miniland in February.

Congratulations to Niftski, who plans to continue chasing Super Mario Bros. immortality in the future. A perfect run is certainly possible, and you can follow all his subsequent speedrunning efforts on Twitch.

Sealed and Graded Copy of Super Mario Bros. Sells for an Astonishing $660,000

I am endlessly fascinated by the people who spend obscene amounts of money on retro video games. Especially because it wasn’t all that long ago that game shops weren’t even interested in games for “obsolete” consoles like the NES or the Atari 2600.

At the time, my pristine used copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! might have fetched a few dollars at a garage sale. However, in today’s market, a CIB (that’s “Complete In Box”) copy of the game can net you more than $1,000. But even that’s chump change compared to a game sale that just closed at Heritage Auctions. According to the auction house, some unnamed person is now the proud owner of a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros.

And all it cost them was… wait for it… $660,000.

That puts it well beyond the previous record-setting price paid for a single game (a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 that sold in November for $156,000), as well an earlier sale of Super Mario’s first NES adventure that went for $140,000. It’s also more than double the $300,000 that Pets.com founder Greg McLemore paid for the Nintendo PlayStation prototype in March 2020.

This copy of Super Mario Bros. was graded 9.4 A+ by Wata Games and comes from the title’s fourth printing, which is notable for its lack of the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s also missing the trademark symbol that would be added to the right of the “Nintendo Entertainment System” branding on later printings:

Not only is this the finest plastic-sealed copy with a perforated cardboard hangtab we’ve ever offered of any black box title, it is also the oldest sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. we’ve ever had the opportunity to offer. This is only the fourth version of Super Mario Bros. ever produced, and its window of production was remarkably short.

Just to paint a better picture of how short this really was — the nationwide release for the console came in mid to late 1986, and black box games distributed for that release did not have the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s worth mentioning that Nintendo managed to add the trademark symbol to the Nintendo Entertainment System on their game boxes by the beginning of 1987. That certainly doesn’t leave much time at all for this variant to be produced in-between the two!

Retro game collecting is certainly going to some wild places, and it’s probably only a matter of time until somebody ponies up more than a million dollars for a single game.