Level two, "Amateur", sounded so good that I suspected a joke was afoot. It was, but only the sort of joke a virtuoso like Rob Landes could pull off. Read the rest

Kisaragi double 6 created this fantastic hand-drawn stop-motion animation of the Super Mario Bros (1985) World 1-1 level.

動画内では分かりづらいものの、紙ならではのこだわりを持った出演者達です。実際に折ったり燃やしたり、クリボーのやられ方を考えるのは、とっても楽しかったです。 pic.twitter.com/GeawVAkagb

— 如月 二重 6 (@KisaragiHutae6) February 11, 2019

A few months back we bought a Nintendo Switch. The portable console gets shared between a 46 year-old dad and an 11 year-old daughter. The Switch sees a lot of playtime. Read the rest

We have started development of an animated movie featuring “Super Mario” with Illumination, the movie studio that brought films such as “Despicable Me” and “Minions.” For this project Mr. Chris Meledandri, Founder and CEO of Illumination and Shigeru Miyamoto, Representative Director, Fellow of Nintendo will co-producing the film. The film will be co-financed by Universal Pictures and Nintendo, and distributed theatrically worldwide by Universal Pictures.

Further announcements on details such as release dates will be made at a later date. We look forward to providing further information about the release timing for this movie that we hope everyone will enjoy.

As a part of our effort to expand Nintendo IP beyond video games, we look forward to bringing smiles to people around the world through this movie.

Let's hope it fares better than last time.

(via Rolling Stone) Read the rest

A Pyro Designs prototyped this ingenious animated Mario fidget spinner, designed by Garrett Kearney. Fidgety zoetropic fun!

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Nope. This Super Mario children's birthday party cupcake arrangement did not turn out as planned. Read the rest

Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (aka @ThePieous) writes, "It is National Pie Day in America tomorrow (not to be confused with "International Pi Day" - the cooler big cousin of pie holidays on March 14th...) In honour of this occasion I've posted a new tutorial video that is very attainable for any novice pie-geeks out there thinking about whipping something up nifty. It features our favourite 8 bit plumber hero, with a special guest appearance at the end." Read the rest

Charles Martinet has been the voice of Nintendo's Mario, Wario, and Luigi for 26 years. (Great Big Story) Read the rest

Redditor enzyme69 used Blender to generate a picture of Mario "drawn" in crayon; this should be a thing. [via r/GenerativeArt] Read the rest

Samuraiguitarist Steve Onotera created this fantastic cover of the Super Mario World music including sound effects made on his guitar. (via Laughing Squid)

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Charlie Cook performs cover versions of songs with a gunslinging twist. Read the rest

Super Mario Bros and other classic games can be run through 3DNes, a nifty 3D emulator. Read the rest

A bizarre glitch in Super Mario World, and an incredible amount of patience, and the SNES classic is transformed into Flappy Bird.

It's incredible to watch SethBling in action. Once the glitch (triggered by giving Mario too many power-ups) is active, machine code can be arbitrary rewritten in memory by carefully moving Mario around. This code can, ultimately, be executed. The process takes an hour of careful pixel-perfect actions in the game world, which becomes stranger and more nightmarish as Mario's universe-editing rituals proceed.

Welcome to the weirdest, most painful, most existentially-nightmarish IDE—and a reminder that our own reality is probably an abandoned simulation waiting for someone to take too many power-ups and turn it all into a sadistic casual game. Read the rest

Researchers at the ETH Game Technology Center of the Swiss national technical institute in Zürich, have applied their considerable talents to the critical problem of immersion in 2D side-scrolling, 8-bit era games. Witness in this video the splendor of a 360° projected Mario world that unrolls across the walls as players reveal each subsequent tile of the game map.

Robert Sumner, founder of the GTC explains:

 ...we observed that the 8-bit era of gaming had a huge collective influence on so many people, but the actual gaming experience was typically an individual one. We wanted to turn this idea upside down, and elevate the NES console experience into a group experience where the game surrounds a large event, allowing multiple people to play in a collaborative setting. The panoramic stitching and 8-way controller multiplexing hardware were the main ways we accomplished this task.

The group submitted the paper "Unfolding the 8-bit Era" to the European Conference on Visual Media Production, and then built the system to unveil at the Eurographics Conference. Utilizing a vintage 8-bit Famicom/NES system and a PC with a point-correspondence vision tracking algorithm, the researchers developed methods to detect the edge of each screen segment, adding it to a continuously expanding texture map in real-time. This panoramic texture is then seamlessly displayed on eight aligned projectors. The vision algorithm requires no prior knowledge about the game, so it is possible to play any side-scroller on this system, such as Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Metroid, and the like. Read the rest

In Josh Millard's excellent "game" Ennuigi, you are invited to "spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made." Read the rest

Approximate translation: "It's the Family Computer's Dream Adventure Game, "Super Mario Bros."! With a mysterious power, he gains a great transformation! Explore the earth, underground, the sea, the sky, and much more to see in this complete world." Read the rest

A front-runner for People’s Choice Award at this year's AI Video Competition is Mario Lives! The University of Tübingen project is working to make video game character Mario self-aware. He's not there yet, but they are taking tiny steps. Read the rest