[M-A-G]

Originally Posted by DAMN iNATOR Some final thoughts on SMB2: Destor brought up the original Mario Bros. game before the first SMB, and it got me to thinking how he started as just a humble protagonist in Donkey Kong, not even called Mario, but rather Jump Man, and how if it wasn’t for its success, there may never have been MB, and thus no other games, and Mario never becomes Mario. And at that point, who knows if the video game industry ever recovers if Nintendo can‘t act as it’s savior. Sega, with it’s Master System, was a distant second and didn’t have a mascot that they could put into a game that would’ve been a smash hit, and if they couldn’t develop one, video games may well have gone the way of the dodo not even 40 years after the development of the very first primitive one of the late 1940s. Certainly a dark alternate timeline that could’ve played out (no pun intended). We all owe Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto and the N.E.S./Famicom a huge debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. On the other hand, you have the horrendous educational Mario games, like Mario is Missing! that nearly sank his whole reputation as Nintendo’s mascot. It’s like MiM! was trying to be a competitor to the Carmen San Diego PC games. And we all probably know of, if not remember, the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing educational game. Yep, there unfortunately also exists Mario Teaches Typing. I think we should all be grateful those kinds of titles didn’t get the same kind of attention as Super Mario World and Super Mario 64, or who knows what Nintendo would look like today, or if they would even still be in business.

I absolutely cannot express the severity of my disgust and disappointment when I found out Mario is Missing! was a fucking educational game, and a poorly executed one at that. It was one of those products that got dumped out at a time when parents were applying the heat to developers and the rest of us had to pay the price. It wasn't like Nintendo couldn't put out a product with some learning value as Mario Paint would go on to demonstrate. But to put out a concept as interesting (at the time) as putting Luigi front and center as the sole protagonist and then pull back the curtain revealing the pearl-clutching mothers at the controls was too cruel. Thankfully Nintendo has more Super Mario World and Wii successes under its belt than Virtual Boy and edu-tainment failures.