Why Super Mario Bros. 3 Confirmed My Faith In Humanity
And continues to inspire me.
One of my strongest childhood memories is of the agonizing months spent waiting for Super Mario Bros. 3. I waited and waited and waited, and when it finally came, it was so much more incredible then I ever could have imagined. The sights and sounds and feelings of the game were etched into my soul. The emotional landscape of these memories defined much of the music I made in my 20s.
To me, Super Mario Bros. 3 is the most important video game ever made.
The year was 1989 and I was waiting for Mario 3. Each morning I woke up hoping that the day had come. It was all I could think about. I dreamed about it. School work suffered because of it. I ached and desired and longed for this game — to finally hold the controller in my hand and to get lost in it.
I remember hearing vague rumors on the playground. What does the whistle do? You can be a hammer bro? I’d run to the mailbox each day looking for a new copy of Nintendo Power. And when it finally arrived there’d be hints and teases — cryptic reports and details.
Mario can fly? He becomes a frog? You can be a statue?!
Finally, the game was released. I played it for the first time at my friend Gary’s house. I went over there after school with a few other kids. I remember looking at the game manual, mesmerized by the drawings. Gary put the game in and I was floored: I was witnessing a masterpiece unfold right there before me. Right from the start, it was bigger and better and more fun than I could ever have dared to hope.
To anticipate a game in this way, and to have it deliver: It confirmed a young boy’s faith in humanity.
We all sat passing the controller around, playing and dying and feeling more at peace with the world than we had ever felt before. Every element of the game was something we had never seen or done. There was joy in small, subtle things like the way the background swayed to the music on the map screen or the way Mario could now slide down hills. And there was awe in the bigger things like the ability to fly (!!) and the amazing variety throughout the game. Every level was full of new experiences: Enemies and blocks 4 times their normal size, Mario hopping around in a boot, and new suit after new suit after new suit.
And then there were the secrets! Mario 3 made us feel as though we, a bunch of 8 year olds, were making a series of amazing discoveries all on our own: Flying into hidden doors, ducking behind the scenery, and the whirlwind of the warp whistle—it was wondrous.
We were in a collective state of flow—the progression of difficulty perfectly aligned to the pace of our improvement. I don’t remember how long we played, but it felt like forever, and it felt like only a moment. We were right where we belonged, having the exact experience we were meant to have.
With Super Mario Bros. 3, I reached my peak video game enthusiasm.
I g0t an SNES in 1991, was excited for Super Mario World, and looked forward to Star Fox, but SMB3 was my Ultimate Video Game Moment. I stopped playing video games at the tail end of 1995, trading my controller for a guitar.
When I finally picked games back up 7 years later, a tidal wave of nostalgia took over my life. The bulk of my 20s was spent trying to capture and express the feelings I had as a kid playing video games. I wrote countless songs about it. I wrote an entire rock opera about it. I paraded around wearing nothing but red overalls, trying everything I could to make the world understand what Mario meant to me.
I’m not sure I ever fully expressed the tangled up mix of longing and bliss attached to Super Mario Bros. 3. Those feelings still influence me and direct my songwriting — when I sit down to write, I’m often tapping into these memories for their emotional resonance. It’s potent stuff.
I recently spent 9 hours (!!) with two friends playing Super Mario 3D world. It was unbelievably fun. It was exhausting. It felt familiar. And there were moments, brief moments, where I caught a glimpse of my 8 year old self staring at the screen in awe.
My dad likes to talk about the first time he heard Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone on the radio: “I was blown away,” he’s fond of saying, “I had just never heard anything like it.”
To my kids, I’ll be saying something similar about Super Mario Bros. 3
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