Special... Super Mario Bros. Style (Patreon)

I love Super Mario Bros. Special. The 1986 release for PC-8801 computers is a distinctly unique take on Super Mario Bros., the flagship game that I'd say is responsible for bringing console gaming back to the US after the Atari 2600 crashed and burned. Some of that "specialness" is due to platform limitations. The PC-88 is an early 80s computer platform with a chip in it that, from my understanding, is roughly similar to the Z80, a chip that got around in everything from the ColecoVision to the arcade version of Pac-Man. It's not exactly a fast machine, and by the time we get to SMB Special's release in 1986, that chip wasn't looking any newer (even if newer revisions of the PC-88 were somewhat more capable than the original model).

Its color palette is a sickly mess. The speed is all over the place, fluctuating as you make your way to screens with more or fewer enemies. The audio is certainly more accomplished than the typical early 80s PC, but not by much. The whole game lopes and undulates along, speed changing as you go, which in turn makes the input feel... wrong. Sometimes you jump, but hey, the frame rate is all over the place. What's the polling rate for keypresses on a PC-88? Who can say??? But I can tell you that it's less than ideal.

Some choices were made with that input, too. Mario holds momentum a lot longer than he does on the NES, so you can let off of the D pad to stop running and push the jump button only to find that he'll still jump forward, like he wasn't finished slowing down yet. It's wild.

Now you might thing that, given all of these restrictions around the way Mario moves and the generally funky way the game operates, that the developers would err on the side of designing levels and scenarios that would be relatively easy to accomplish under these circumstances. Nope! Instead they made a nightmare of hidden blocks placed right where you're trying to jump, messing you up and probably tossing you in a pit. Is this the first example of "kaizo" Mario? I wouldn't really consider the "real" Super Mario Bros. 2 to be a proper kaizo game. But SMB Special feels deliberate. It feels like the developers are sending a message to you, the player. And that message is "hey, fuck you, try again."

The deeper you get through the game's 32 levels the more frequently you see pixel-perfect jumps that you can only make with something resembling frame perfect timing... in a game where those frames just sort of show up whenever they feel like it, instead of playing out at a consistent pace. Oh, and hey, by the way, the game doesn't scroll like regular Super Mario Bros. does, either. It flips. When you get closer to the edge of the screen, it cuts to black and redraws the new screen that you're on. This is incredibly disorienting and, once again, the game doesn't pull any punches here. The game throws blind jumps at you pretty frequently, forcing you to just fling yourself off the edge of the screen and hope that there's a platform waiting for you on the other side. It's incredible.

Hudson, who developed the game, also took the time to include a few enemies and power-ups that didn't appear in Actual Super Mario Bros., too. Like the hammer from Donkey Kong? Yeah, crazy, right? Also barrels from DK show up along with some of the enemies from regular-ass, non-super Mario Bros.. It's actually a really neat throwback in that specific way. In some ways Hudson does a better job of honoring Mario's full legacy here than Nintendo usually does.

This game is a blight, a pox upon us all. A real messed-up chunk of code. And I love every messed up pixel of this piece of trash. It's wild to see someone other than Nintendo playing around with the Super Mario Bros. concepts, especially this early in the game. In some ways it's a reminder of the way companies freely licensed their arcade properties out to different home manufacturers. Atari, for example, produced some home versions of Donkey Kong. Coleco did the Atari 2600 version, which an entirely different flavor of broken. Sega ported Spy Hunter home to some machines. Parker Brothers had Frogger and Popeye. And so on. Nintendo wasn't going to go produce a PC-88 Mario game on their own. But Hudson would! They also did similarly warped and fascinating things with ideas from regular Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong 3. So, historically, I think there's something a little important to be seen in Super Mario Bros. Special, even if it largely amounts to a footnote or two.

I love this bad game. Also, this bad game has RetroAchivements. I streamed it years ago, but due to the requirements RA puts on unlocking the "hardcore" versions of its achievements, I never truly finished the game. It's been gnawing away at me a bit over the years, so earlier this week I felt that I should return to the scene of the crime and give it another go.

Maybe the truly disgusting thing here is that even after running through this game last week, I'm already kind of thinking about playing it again, this time running it on the MiSTer's PC-88 core, which seems slightly more stable and even-keeled than RetroArch's implementation of QUASI88, a long-running (read: old) PC-88 emulator.

So I think it's safe to say that you'll see me and Super Mario Bros. Special reunite sometime down the line, as ridiculous as that sounds. Hey, maybe I'll check out the Sharp X1 version of the game next time...