Super Mario 2 IS A LIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Really I'm sure at some point most of everyone who grew up in North America around my age has played NES. I would almost bet that everyone who has played this system has experienced the 8-bit fun that the Mario Bro's have brought to the table. I can remember waking up early every weekend morning (something at the ripe age of 22 I STILL CAN'T SHAKE) to play Nintendo with my father. Certain games were in the heavy rotation, like black bass, cabal, Dr. Mario and golf. There was one game though that stood out from all of the other cartridges, Super Mario Bros 3. Now I'm sure everyone who owned Nintendo had Super Mario Bros 1, and don't get me wrong its a fun game as thats probably a huge factor in being the best selling video game of all time, but it lacked the magic of super mario 3.



I remember waking up and running to the basement to see my dad playing the 2 player mode, keeping Lugi warm for me like the best dad he is, somewhere around the sand level. Usually we played until we lost all of our lives or beat the game, which only happened twice. I never really owned mario bros 2, actually I only had one friend who owned this game, and from what I can remember he had all the cool toys of the 90's (slip and slide, crocodile mile, 3D0, virtual boy, merlin, and 3 in 1 air hockey, ping pong and pool).




My first experience with this game was rather mixed, it looked like mario, it said "mario", but it didn't really feel like mario. The were no weird mushroom guys or fireballs, but instead these weird ghost guys (according to Nintendo "weird guys" and RADISHES? what kind of B.S is this...Italians dot eat radishes, mario would have been so much more bad ass with some fireballs or a tail. Also whats up with those sub-space levels where vegetables give you coins? Also instead of dragon turtle half breed bosses, the player was left to do battle with a pink dinosaur who spat out eggs? There was no challenge in beating Barny's down-syndrome brother.



Pipes were replaced by Aztec vases, magic carpets all the sudden made an appearance, and worst of all one of the best villains in a video game, EVER, was replaced with a freaking white mouse. If its any consolation, he seemed like he ate all of mario's mozzarella. What kinda of name is MOUSER anyway.




So the million dollar question is why would they fix what isn't broke, Super mario was a hit selling 25 million plus copies before SMB2 came out. The answer is...IT ISNT ACTUALLY SUPER MARIO 2, IT IS Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic!






Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic was developed in cooperation with Fuji Television to promote its Yume Kōjō '87 (tr. Dream Factory '87) event, which showcased several of Fuji TV's latest TV shows and other products at the time. The game featured the mascots of the Yume Kōjō festival — a family consisting of siblings Imajin and Lina and their parents, Papa and Mama — as its main characters. Essentially what happened was Nintendo bought the rights from FUJI and changed the characters to the mario cast.



Doki Doki Panic's intro sequence is this: Two kids are reading a book, when a big green hand pops out and yanks them into the book. Their pet monkey runs off to find help. A family finds the book, then decides to jump into it and save the kids. In Super Mario Bros. 2, the intro is just a story about how Mario dreamt about some weird land. Not too exciting.






There of course where some other slight changes, mainly stuff that someone could do in half a day. They speed up the waterfalls, in SMB2 the underworld music has an added drum sample and is slowed down from the original version in Doki Doki Panic, the slot machine minigame has a green background in Doki Doki Panic, as opposed to the title screen variant in smb2 and in Doki Doki Panic, when a bomb explodes, it says "BOM", as opposed to "BOMB" in Super Mario Bros. 2.








Really everyone was dupped. Not even the Wizard knew this was going on. It was a brilliant economic move to capitalize on the success of the worlds most beloved Italian plumber. The copy sold something like 8 million in the N of A, and I'm sure more in Europe as well, unless the British where still playing commadore 64.



Nintendo actually did make a SMB2 game, but it turned out too similar to the first SMB, and it was believed it wouldn't progress the series any further. The game never hit the market until it was released as the "lost levels" on Super Mario all stars for super Nintendo. If you ever played super mario all stars you know this was probably a smart move cause those lost levels where a huge snore fest, and most likely should have stayed "lost".





and now you know.
marc