Why I Love Mario

I was introduced to Mario at an early age, occasionally playing Donkey Kong on the Commodore 64, but the love affair only began after I received the original Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas. I was slow to catch on to the idea of video games, but once I clearly and distinctly grasped the correspondance between the buttons I pushed and the actions of that lovable brown and red dwarf on the screen, there was no turning back. A shameful portion of my life was spent in the basement playing Nintendo; entire summers passed by without my knowledge; I reached a symbolic turning point when I stayed home from the final meet of my "pay to play" track team and instead beat Mario 2, still the most compelling in the series, in my opinion. I admit that I was distracted by the false idols of Zelda II (notice the simple, straightforward style of the Mario series, always using the easily recognizable Arabic numerals instead of the pretensious and inefficient Roman equivalents) and Final Fantasy -- but Mario remained my true passion. I remember my excitement at receiving the issue of Nintendo Power that reviewed (or advertised) Mario 3, which was to be the crowning achievement of the 8-bit consoles. I remember devouring the official strategy guide, with its detailed maps of every stage, before even so much as playing the game. Then I remember the joy -- no, the ecstacy -- I experienced as early as stage 1-1 as Mario gained a racoon's tail and with it the power of flight. I hadn't been in a biology class yet, but I knew that racoons couldn't fly -- but it didn't matter, did it? The non sequitur added to the allure. By the time I had earned the teddy-bear-with-racoon-tail and the Hammer Brothers suits, I knew that I was not playing a simple game. I was playing a part of history, a flawless marriage of Japanese pop-culture nonsense and Italian stereotypes that was as certain as Milton's immortal Paradise Lost to be a permanent fixture in the great Western cultural tradition.

I had beaten Mario 3 all too soon and was longing for more when the Super Nintendo entered my life. Super Mario World, the Mario 1 of the next generation of Nintendo consoles, was considerably tamer than the two 8-bit sequels, refraining from the complete paradigm shift represented by Mario 2 and reigning in the creative excesses that sometimes threatened to throw Mario 3 into an abyss of complete incoherence. The introduction of Yoshi was ingenious, yes, but still Super Mario World could hardly stand up to the vigor, the urgency, of the 8-bit Mario sequels. I made the obligatory trips through the annoyingly cute Donut Plains and Choco Island; I completed the circuit of the mysterious and frustrating Star World; I passed through the back door of Bowser's castle to give him a thrashing he is not likely to soon forget -- but it had long since begun to seem automatic, almost obligatory. I was playing a Mario game not because of its innovative gameplay or gripping storyline, but simply out of my sense of duty to the Mario franchise.

Things quickly changed when I became hooked on Super Mario Kart -- I forgave Nintendo for misspelling "cart" when I realized the magnitude of their achievement in this game. In it, twenty courses are presented to the player, who must choose between eight subtly different characters in his quest for victory. The incomparable Mario brothers were options, but I was more compelled by the chance to root for the dark side, experimenting with Donkey Kong and even Bowser himself, but finally settling on Koopa Troopa. Oh, to find a woman who is as perfect a match as Koopa Troopa -- his acceleration, his top speed, and above all his handling all convinced me that I had in this loveable bird in a turtle shell as close to a soulmate as I would ever find. Koopa Troopa and I stuck together through good times and bad, through the joy of surfing along in Koopa Beach 1 and the agony of repeatedly banging into walls in Bowser's Castle 3, through the exhaltation of finally finishing first in Donut Plains 3 and the frustration of hurtling into the abyss on Rainbow Road. We mourned together when we ran out of continues; we celebrated together when we finally got to witness the ending, having thoroughly beaten every course and circuit.

After Super Mario Kart, I was distracted from the Mario franchise by women and literature, but my interest was rekindled in college when I received Super Mario All-Stars, a Super Nintendo compilation of all the original Mario games, together with a collection of new levels previously available only in Japan. Before approaching the new levels, however, I had to settle accounts. To my shame, I had never defeated Mario 1 in the original, and I will almost certainly never have an opportunity to do so due to the rapid deterioration of the original Nintendo consoles. The Super Mario All-Stars version was substantially the same, with some notable exceptions: the brown Mario was replaced by the now-familiar red and blue version, a save game feature was added, and most decisively, a bell rang in the "maze" stages to alert the player he had gone the wrong way. I had gotten to the nearly impossible 8-4 on the original version, but I had always gotten hopelessly lost in the maze. With the crutch of the warning bells, I was able to defeat it with relative ease, but I knew that it would have taken me years to accomplish the same feat without that added enhancement. I was able to complete the Lost Levels with some difficulty, but I felt that my achievement had been permanently tarnished. Even if by some miracle I found a working NES with Mario 1, I could never return to my pre-warning-bell innocence: my repeated trial and error had allowed me to memorize the correct path, keeping me from ever overcoming the obscenely difficult challenge the original geniuses behind Mario 1 had intended.

Though I never fully delved into the Mario games for the Nintendo 64, Mario has remained a fixture in my life. He has been a staple in my computer wallpaper gallery, he has inspired my most popular and consistently amusing away message for AOL Instant Messenger, and I still regularly play Super Mario Kart as a way of grounding myself, of reminding myself of the really important influences that have shaped me. Throughout the tumult of my adolescence, my two serious dating relationships, my conversion to Catholicism, my semester at Oxford, and my car accident, I have been able to endure and thrive because of the soil in which my life has been planted. Certainly other factors, the love and support of my immediate and extended family, the encouragement of gifted educators, the fellowship of good friends, have helped me to become the person I am today -- but where would I be had I never gotten the first mushroom that made me double in size? And so I offer this tribute to Mario and to the geniuses at Nintendo who created him, to thank him and them for helping me to grow my own racoon tail and fly into the adult world with confidence.