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RetroMo: Mario's Handheld History

Did you know that Mario starred in eight Game Boy and GBC games? Rediscover your roots inside...

Recently, in the run up to the release of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, I found myself hungering for a portable Mario more than usual. I had bought fair amount of Mario games over the years but somehow ended up losing or giving away nearly all of them. So I embarked upon a little quest to obtain the missing games, only to find that there were far more Mario titles than I ever purchased myself. A variety of puzzle games, sports titles and naturally the Mario Kart titles. So where did this all begin?

For me, it was Christmas morning 1990. Presents were unwrapped, and among them I found a Game Boy. I jumped around for a while like a maniac, hurriedly opened the box, cracked open the free batteries, put the cartridge in and powered the unit on. My mom became addicted to Tetris, creating a constant struggle for the handheld. I needed a different game, something my mom wouldn't want to play. With Christmas cash in hand, I scampered off to the shops and grabbed the obvious choice of game, thrust my cash onto the counter and immediately opened the box and began to play.

Super Mario Land

Mario's first outing on our little green-screened plaything was familiar to his original home console outing, though with very basic graphics. The important thing was that the gameplay remained intact - that traditional block breaking, bad guy stomping fun. The simplicity of the game's visuals did nothing to hide the fact you still needed to perform precision platform jumping to succeed. The game had a slightly different style to the home Mario titles, due in part to having been developed under the hand of Gunpei Yokoi, the designer of the Game Boy itself rather than being developed by Mr. Miyamoto.

The story behind the game was that Princess Daisy (not Peach!) had been kidnapped by some mysterious space monster named Tatanga, and that our man Mario, being quite the princess rescuer extraordinaire, heard of her capture and took up the challenge of freeing her. The game was quite short, featuring only four worlds, of three stages each.

The first world, Birabuto has an Egyptian theme, with pyramids and sphinxes aplenty. The second is a watery world named Muda, with Mario negotiating platforms suspended over watery oblivion. The third world, Easton, is a rocky place full of bouncing boulders and rampaging Easter Island heads - quite scary. The fourth and final world, Chai, is a mysterious far eastern inspired place, even featuring some spooky (at the time) ghosties. Some variety was introduced by making two of the levels, the end of world 2 and world 4 scrolling shooting levels. Mario sat in either a little submarine or plane, blasting away at enemies and navigating through tight passages until he got to the world boss who he had to blast with exactly 20 well-placed missiles to pass.

While by no means the most polished of Mario titles, the original Super Mario Land no doubt holds a place in many of our hearts due to it being the first Mario that we got to take everywhere with us. I know of grown men who are reduced to tears at the sound of the game's end theme.

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