Super Mario World(SNES) |
In 1991 the Super Nintendo came out in America and it's killer title at launch of course was Super Mario World, an expansion on what the 8-bit NES brought us just a few years before with Super Mario Bros. 3 - a game that outsold the friggin Beatles! Actually, the whole story has come up in recent years about how SMW was developed, and it's pretty interesting.
Basically, when under development, Shigeru Miyamoto and his team instead decided to "port" Super Mario Bros. 3 to the Super Nintendo, and then work from there as a template from what I understand. Images for this were as early as 1989, and 1990, with the final product taking shape by 1991. In 1991, the game was released and was a smash hit, I consider this the peak before the decline of Mario Mania (1988-1994) - this game and Super Mario Bros. 3 were the summit of the series, and then it all sort of declinded a bit and plateaued from there. Super Mario World was a departure. Princess Peach/Toadstool was once again held captive by Bowser Koopa, and protected by his 7 Koopa Kids hiding in various fortresses around the place called "Dinosaur Land". So rather than the Mushroom Kingdom, we were in a new place. This was mostly to revovle around one of Shigeru's longtime goals as a dev - getting Mario to ride a dinosaur. This idea went all the way back to the first Super Mario Bros. game in 1985, but the tech was not there yet, until this game. Super Mario World is pretty much the titular title for the SNES, that everyone had, as it was the pack-in cartridge. It's hype lasted until about 1994, when the big thing by then was Doom on PC, and the up and coming Super Nintendo CD - whiich eventually became the Sony Playstation.The Summit of Mania, and "Gaming Maturity" - My Experiences The SNES and Super Mario World by extention came out at a time of "change". See, my generation's oldest, 1981-1983 as they say now (used to be 1982-1985)...anyway, we were getting to that magical (and horrifying) age of puberty - yay! If you've watched Big Mouth or Stranger Things, you might be aware of how much things shift. When the SNES came out, I was still a wannabe country boy into monster trucks - when the N64 came out, I was already a rock musician composing his own songs on guitar, and more concerned with how I was going to continue/end my life after high school, than what the next stupid video game release was. Oh to be an ignorant little kid again! Going into this, Mario was everywhere, we had a new cartoon (Super Mario World), we had new march (like that wrist watch with a Mario game in it), business as usual. But unlike Mario 3, which was a huge thing, it sort of petered out early - because then came the bowl cuts, the flannel, the teenage angst, and the glorification of mental illness and substance abuse - yeppers, we were teenagers. I was studying Nirvana and learning to play the guitar. Now instead of spending my nights playing SUper Nintendo in lieu of homework, I was spending my nights playing GUITAR instead of homework. If you ever wondered why the "misc" section is so piecemeal, this is the best explaination, this is all the random s*** I got into right before I quit being a "gamer" and became a musician. And part and parcel of that change is you don't find any of the "kid stuff" interesting anymore, instead, you find it creepy you're even looking at it. Video Games change from this all-time consuming thting that you are obsessed with, into a past-time - THAT is where gaming maturity comes from. Anyway, back to the game. I first got to play this with two Israeli kids - Jeremy and Octaw (SP?) who lived near my friend in the townhouses next door to my sister's collegate neighborhood. We'd hang out and play this. Then Jonathan got one for Christmas. I liked it so I w anted one. So I went in halfsies on my 10th birthday for a Super Nintendo - which came with a rebate for Super Mario All-Stars for free as a second game. IIRC, I think I put in more than half, around $154 - the most money I'd ever had in my life up to that point, and then mom filled in the rest for my birthday. I remember getting quite good at this one pretty fast, but of course I already had a head start at my friend's houses in Auburn. So I used to play this a lot. A ton actuually, so much that when I came back to it last year on my Wii, I was quite shocked how many "secrets" I still remembered from my 10 year old brain almost 30 years ago. Today, I still bring this one out from time to time via the Wii Virtual Console, as I bought it from Nintendo again in 2013, it was one of the first SNES games I got foor Wii Virtual Console actually, because I wanted all the OLD Mario Games on there. Wiis, they're better than RetroPie, I tell ya, more stable, they don't break down, they run 24/7/365, and they don't complain. Sure there's a lot of fluff that can be "scrapped" but seriously, I'm a huge proponent of the Wii as a Emulation platform. |