A filmic tribute to the only true hero I've ever known

Scenes taken the 1988 movie Peaches.

Super Mario War: A history of The Mushroom Kingdom

I love this because of how much everyone else hates it. Anyway, let me fill you in on some Mario canon that may be unfamiliar to you, which will hopefully help you come to understand the strange ongoing relationship between Mario, Peach, Bowser, and friends. Everything I say here is taken straight from the games. I'm not relying on supplemental material like instruction booklets or spinoffs like Turtles in Time.

The first game allowing playable Koopas

For the sake of sanity, we're going to say that Super Mario Bros. is the first Mario game. It's the first one with any sense of a plot, the first clearly set in the Mushroom Kingdom, the first appearance of Toadstool/Peach, King Koopa/Bowser, so forth. It's the first non-Donkey Kong Mario that you can really give a skiff about. This first chapter of the story I'm about to relate pertains to Super Mario Bros. and its first true follow-up, Super Mario Bros. 3. I can't even say I remember where things go from there, but I'm sure it gets pretty hairy. Some sort of Jurassic Park situation IIRC.

So here's the deal. Super Mario Bros. is clearly set during a war, presumably between the Mushroom Kingdom and whatever Kingdom Bowser is in charge of (remember, his name at the time was King Koopa). We'll call it the Koopa Kingdom. Mario might be a Mushroom soldier, but his uniform certainly isn't regulation. Most likely he's a commando on a one-man crusade to rescue the princess and topple Bowser's reign. That said, it could also be interpreted that Mario is a revolutionary, trying to end a cruel monarchy, and that the entire game is set in only one kingdom - that is, Bowser is the King of the same country where Toadstool is Princess. It remains unclear, but I prefer the latter theory, if only because there is no apparent delineation between levels supposedly set in different kingdoms.

A particular narrative delight is 6-3, which gives us a glimpse at the pre-war Mushroom Kingdom. You may remember 6-3 as the black-and-white level, at the opening of which Mario softly utters "I remember now...". The black-and-white imagery is a common visual trope, indicating that this scene takes place years in the past. 6-3 is idiosyncratic in that it is the only one of the 32 stages that is completely devoid of the standard Koopa armies. No Koopers, Goombas, or even Fishy-Bloos, just a few solitary Bullet Bills foreshadowing the onslaught to come. Some have suggested that this is the first day of the Koopa invasion, a D-Day of sorts, which Mario is now recalling, remembering how far he's come.

The game is spread over the course of eight "worlds", each culminating in a castle infiltration. It seems clear from this that Mario is embarking on eight different military campaigns, each targeted at one of Bowser's strongholds. The post-boss dialogue - "our princess is in another castle" - makes explicit that Mario takes down each of these fortresses with the expectation that the princess is held within. Considering the span of his conquest and the effort it would realistically take for one man to overcome an army, it seems natural that each of these "worlds" may take place over a span of time closer to a year than the few minutes it takes to play through in the game.

This is where things get controversial. As I see it, it seems a surety based on Mario's extensive spy/informant network that he does indeed have the correct castle each time, but King Koopa manages to evacuate the princess just in time to move to his next stronghold and leave Mario fighting a Replicant and rescuing a Toad.  This explains how Toadstool was able to give birth to eight Koopa children in the span of the first game (the third being an immediate sequel). She was trapped in each castle for a year and had no choice but to... well, you've been to the Internet, I don't need to explain it to you. As Koopa has never had another romantic interest (nor do there appear to be adult females of his species), this is the only provable origin on the Koopa Kids. Also, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 pretty heavy-handedly hints that's what happened. Plus Peach is openly Bowser Jr.'s mother, so it's not like the two are... strangers to intimacy.

History01: Sqoon-a-woon spoon! MIGHT BE A SQOONAtiC UR LOOKING FORRRR

What do you get when you take a tiny subhuman and

ZINGER ALREADY! SUbHUMAN! Sqoon is a half-submarine, half-man!

Or okay... a submarine with a face. Yah, it's kinda fucking weird. He is FUCKING PISSED too. Clearly Sqoon was not told he was going to be painted pink. Buncha dicks.

So anyway Sqoon is a brand new game that all the kids have been talking about and trading Pokemon Cards about and taking the nation by storm about and it's because of the submarine aspect. Submarines are hottt right now; on the TV is a new show called Submarine City, on the movies it's a new movie called Submarine City, and on the radio everything still sucks. I don't know what they're playing except on the classical station, but I promise me, it is fucking atrocious. That's why people are turning to Sqoon - they're finally getting fed up with the process cheese microwave reheated McDonalds sponsored pop musicians. Sqoon is offering something different. It's offering a new future.

It's offering a future where presidents can vote for other presidents, because America finally lost all hope. A future where everyone is painted pink, and is angry about it. A future where R-Type actually isn't the only game that Irem ever made.

This post is bad, and I do mean bad. It's like nonsense can't even read it why even post it bad. It's "whelp, that blog is dead to me" bad. Let me try to fact it back onto the rails.

Irem was a great developer. They made a lot of really cool games, and what you especially might not know is that they briefly took the name Nazca Corporation before being fully absorbed into SNK as "the Metal Slug team". It's kinda hard to follow this kind of history which is something I've always lamented - basically all we have to go by are the credit reels of various releases, full of abbreviated names and aliases. There doesn't seem to be a ton of great documentation out there because no one was sitting down with Akio and interviewing him about Legend of Hero Tonma. Instead these days all we have are these corporate ueber-icons like Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux alright now I'm derailing my rerailing. If anyone has a good resource for classic Japanese game dev history, do share. The best I know of are the woefully incomplete MobyGames and the far too wordocious Hardcore Gaming 101 (check out both sites though, they're good resources).

I was talking about Irem. They made all these random good games, and then they made Metal Slug. And that's coming from someone who thinks R-Type completely fucking blows. But there's lots of neat and experimental stuff, the kind of stuff bighead modern game devs and journalists forget existed when they talk about how primitive the '80s was. I'll tell you what's primitive. Someone who thinks they can talk about games without having played Ninja Spirit, Metal Storm, or Spartan X 2. And did you know they did FUCKING MOON PATROL?! Talk about landmark. Word on the street is that's the game that invented parallax. YA DIG?!

So if being painted pink PISSES YOU OFF and you want to kill every last shark left in the post-apocalypse, go try Sqoon. It's kinda hard and you're gonna need to find an FAQ or a copy of the manual to understand the human-rescuing system, but it's a game about a race of submarines rising in the wake of humanity to blow up what's left of sunken civilization! AGHHHHHHHHHHH