The arcade port from Hell
In a cramped beachside arcade, sandwiched between Galaga and Mortal Kombat 3, sits my white whale. It’s surrounded by restaurants, a roller coaster, churro vendors, and a carousel, this sad little Super Mario Bros. arcade cabinet.
It isn’t much to look at, with its chipped, gaudy yellow paint and weathered artwork. The monitor is tiny and its picture quality about as clear as mud. The buttons are sticky, and the stick is buttony. You could look right through it, and never even know it’s there.
Maybe that’s what I like about it, this unassuming relic with a dark side.
I first happened upon this thing years and years ago, strolling down the sun-drenched Santa Monica Pier and into its dingy oceanfront arcade. That’s where I discovered this wolf in sheep’s clothing, the place I shall return to time and again until I slay the dragon.
The affair all started so innocently. “An old Mario arcade cabinet!” I exclaimed, probably, darting over and feeding quarters into the machine. What a thrill it was, playing a game I (seemingly) had played a thousand times before. Experiencing it on something other than a home console felt so new and novel. Oh, little did I know…
And then it happened. As I leapt over a familiar goomba, Shigeru Miyamoto reached out from the screen and smacked me right in the face. Mario collided with an invisible block, and was sent careening into the very thing he sought to avoid. It was at that moment I realized this wasn’t my Super Mario Bros., but something else entirely.
You see, I know this game like the back of my hand. That block wasn’t supposed to be there. That subtle difference tipped me off. The arcade version must have been some sort of devilish doppelganger cooked up by the masterminds at Nintendo, a device designed to punish cocky shits like me and extract quarters from wide-eyed souls. As many quarters as possible.
Over the years, I’ve pumped a lot of quarters into that machine, learned its tricks, let it lull me into a false sense of security only to find everything I thought I ever knew flipped on its head. That invisible block was just the canary in the coal mine. Many more surprises awaited me, most notably, changes to the game’s warp zones.
The Super Mario Bros. I was raised on lets players skip from the the first world to the fourth, and, from there, the eighth and final. This isn’t the case in Vs. Super Mario Bros., though. The furthest these well-known secrets will take you is world six. Then things just start getting plain weird.
The arcade version poaches levels wholesale from Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, a game renowned for its extreme difficulty. As you might imagine, this makes finishing it an incredible challenge. One level, in particular, gets me every time. Its massive chasms and springs are difficult to surmount at the best of times, much less playing on some decrepit machine that’s been decomposing there for three decades.
I’ve never beaten the game, a sad reality that frustrates me to no end. Sure, I can finish it at home in eight minutes flat, but that blasted arcade machine bests me every time. Maybe one day I’ll make an afternoon of it, being patient and frivolous, finding the will to try and try again instead of storming off in disgust upon seeing the words “game over” scroll across the screen. Maybe. I’ll definitely keep working at it, though. It’s an obsession, something I have to do.
