I have to say, I have Mario 3 on my mind.
I was watching this big Mario 3 Battle Royale thing done by twitch streamer Mitchflowerpower the other week or so which really got me thinking about being a really young kid. As I get older I think nostalgia articles are gonna become more common on here. I'm honestly feeling this total branching-out brain-stimulation and memory-stimulating nostalgia all down-my-spine for Mario 3 right now.
That Mario 3 Battle Royale was many players playing Mario 3 and the fastest players to beat the game would then advance to the next round until many rounds later out of the 100+ Mario 3 players only four would remain to battle it out for the 2022 Mario 3 Championship...
...and watching it, I really thought, if this happened in 1989 when Mario 3 was really out and the Wizard movie (starring Fred "Kevin Arnold" Savage) was in theaters... kids my age back then would have been FAINTING watching something like a Mario 3 Battle Royale. They wouldn't even have been asking but sugar-crazed harassing their poor parents to let them be in something like this.
Now a days, video games are so common but I truly remember when the video game craze totally started. I really do. I remember the time when they went from almost nobody having them to every kid having them... and it happened almost over night.
Atari and stuff was already out but only geeks n' weirdos really had it. It was not common (my grandpa gave me one but my grandpa was cool) for kids to have Ataris ....but at some point in the mid 80s it just went from nobody having video games to EVERYONE having them in like a snap of a finger.
I remember getting the first Nintendo, the NES, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Me and my family (Mother, Father, Sister, and Brother (Me)) were on a road trip down in beautiful Massachusetts and, I remember this as plain as Yesterday, even though this happened almost 35 years ago... we were in the mall and my dad was crouched near the bottom shelf of an aisle, I was short back then and didn't need to crouch, and we were looking at Nintendos! My eyes were glazed over and my mind stopped working! I asked if after we bought it we can hook it up in the motel... and I wouldn't take no for an answer... I had to start playing it as soon as possible... and I just would not accept waiting 'til we got back home to Canada to play it. I needed to play it there, that minute, that second, in the beautiful US of A where they had cheap Nintendos in their malls for kids to buy and play in great abundance. I loved being in that country, this USA, where these cheap Nintendos were just waiting to be bought...I wanted to stay there... hook it up in the motel...and play Mario...in the USA all day...
....yet alas, I had pushed my luck and we didn't buy it that day....
...when we got home a kid on my street got one before I did and I told to him my tragic tale that I would've got one last week but I pushed my luck wanting to play it in the American motel room... but he didn't believe me...
...I sat at home regretting asking to hook it up in the United States, to play Nintendo then-and-there in that amazing country, for what seemed like an eternity... until one day, not much later, I got a Nintendo... and my life finally was wonderful. My life became wonderful, that day...
....the day that I got a Nintendo.
A few years later, in 1989, a movie came out that had kids losing their minds. Now, I read a lot of reviews and people's opinions or memories of this film as it being a "a big commercial for Nintendo" and it being bad...
...but, friend, let me tell you something.......
....you not know of what you speaketh. You don't. You knoweth not of anything of which you speaketh, at all. You really don't. You don't know whateth of you speak.
I'm talking about The Wizard (1989, run time 100 minutes)... and if you have seen this film and did not like it... all I can say is... you were NOT a kid in 1989. No way. Because if you were a kid (not pre-teen or teen... but a real kid kid like under twelve) you regard this film as a true masterpiece of cinema. A true and complete Masterpiece of Art.
I mean, to think, we could have something like this. This amazing thing they go to in this film. The mere thought of a "Video Championship" was uncomprehensible to us. On top of it all its an adventure movie... these three kids had to run away from home to play in the Video Championship! Oh, wait, you think that's all it had going for it? Nay, nay, I say...for it also....culminated at the climax of the film.... with the game that had to be played to win the Video Championship... being a game no one had yet SEEN outside of the fairy-tale land of Japan yet.
Yes, Kevin Arnold's very shy and broken-hearted-over-divorced-parents little brother... had to play MARIO 3!!!
We lost it. All of kids as a whole in 1989. LOST IT. We lost it. Our minds, that is. We all fully lost our minds over this. A third Mario was coming out!
To underscore how big this was in 1989 to a kid... I cannot find words that exist to describe how the entirety of kid-hood the whole body of kid-dom ... the Society of Kids of 1989... I mean, every kid on EARTH, all of us, were losing our minds!!!!
This commercial is not an exaggeration of reality. This Mario 3 commercial was not even accurately portraying how all of children around North America and Beyond were out of their skulls to get their hands on this game! Portraying the fervor as a band of kids joined together to turn America into a giant Mario head is an understatement of reality....it was BIGGER than this. Much much bigger than this.
This commercial is true. Nintendo was empowering our generation like nothing before. We truly believed in Mario.... he was easy to believe in... because we played Mario 1 and Mario 2 like they were more important than any Super Bowl every day of our lives! We believed in ourselves too!
We, as kids, were an unstoppable force! We as a whole under the symbol of Mario would meet any challenge! We could face any obstacle! We could play video games ALL DAY and EAT JUNK FOOD and STAY UP ALL NIGHT and not even nobody could STOP US not even with a battalion of tanks and wild horses could ANYONE even DREAM of stopping us from playing MARIO THREE!
It was that big a deal, guys. It was.
Anyways....
I don't really think Mario 3 is a great game for speed running because of the side-scrollin' camera-pan stuff. Like, you get on one of Bowser's dumb boats and all of a sudden your grandma's holding a VHS camera recording you playing and you can only advance the screen when she decides to pan to the right.... that's what it feels like... and that's not conducive for speed running....but...
...as a 100+ contestant free-for-all speed run? Like in 1989's the Wizard? Where people gather from all over America to play Mario 3? Where the "hands"* come into play and put an element of chaos into the event that even mediocre players might advance to the finals? Guys....why isn't this an Olympic Event!?
Why isn't this in the Olympics? I don't really understand things like this. What are they doing at the Winter Olympics now out there in the cold? Falling down some ice or tumbling down a snowy hill?
Guys...let's play Mario 3 at the Winter Olympics! It can be outdoors if you want, even... like in a big igloo with a World Six ice-world themed decor. Guys....
Guys. Guys, guys, guys.......guys.
Why? Why can't we do cool stuff? Japan played all this video game music at the last Olympics (snubbing the Mother series, mind you, shoulda had a coupla songs from Earthbound at the Olympics, Japan).... it whetted our whistles...
...it whetted our whistles for Video Games at the Olympics!
(* The "Hands" are in World 8 where Mario has a random-generated chance of being dragged into a level by evil hands three times. Some people have to play three more levels, some only two, some one, and some very very lucky players have none.)
