Category: Free Play

Random bits of news and one-off articles that don’t fit anywhere else can be found in Free Play.

A Copy of id Software’s PC Port of Super Mario Bros. 3 Has Been Donated to the Strong Museum

David Kushner meticulously detailed the story of id Software’s founding in 2003’s Masters of Doom, tracking the legendary development team’s history back through the creation of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But before all that, John Carmack and John Romero approached Nintendo with the idea of releasing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the PC.

Nintendo’s signature brand of platforming wasn’t possible on the underpowered PCs of the time, but Carmack cracked the code in 1990 with the creation of his “smooth scrolling” engine. Sensing that this was a very big deal, the team (then known as IFD: Ideas from the Deep) got to work producing a prototype to show Nintendo:

Over those seventy-two hours, they fell into crunch mode. […] They got the game down to a T: Mario’s squat little walk, the way he bopped the animated tiles, sending out the coins, the way he leapt on the turtles and kicked their shells, the clouds, the Venus’s-flytraps, the pipes, the smooth scrolling. By the time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the bestselling hit in the world. The only noticeable difference was the title screem, which, under the Nintendo copyright, credited the makers, a company name the guys borrowed from Romero and Lane, Ideas from the Deep.

Unsurprisingly, Nintendo rejected the demo, but the new technology inspired IFD to create their own game, Commander Keen, and adopt the more familiar id Software moniker a year later.

According to Kushner, the developers eagerly shared their adaptation of Super Mario Bros. 3 with friends and collaborators as they worked on Commander Keen, and in 2015, Romero gave us a peek at what could have been when he uploaded a short playthrough of the prototype to his Vimeo channel:

Even though it was apparently distributed far and wide, this important piece of PC gaming history stayed hidden for more than 30 years. But a new report on Ars Technica has revealed that a floppy disk containing id’s Super Mario Bros. 3 prototype was recently donated to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.

The Strong Museum, which also operates the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and the World Video Game Hall of Fame, said they will make the prototype available to historians and researchers upon request. There’s also the possibility that it could find its way into a public exhibit in the future.

My only question is, what happens when you type in “IDDQD”?

Sealed Copy of Super Mario 64 is First Game to Sell for More Than $1 Million

Just days after a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda sold at auction for $870,000, a similarly-preserved copy of Super Mario 64 sold for nearly twice that amount… $1.56 million to be exact.

This is the first time a single game has sold for more than a million dollars, but surprisingly, there’s not much that’s particularly noteworthy about this copy of Mario’s first 3D adventure.

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A Sealed and Graded Copy of The Legend of Zelda Sells for $870,000

I guess Mario isn’t the only classic video game character who can bring in the big bucks from collectors.

On Friday, Heritage Auctions held their first standalone “Video Game Signature Auction” and auctioneers brought the hammer down on a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda for $870,000. This eye-popping price isn’t just impressively high, it also set a new record for a single game transaction.

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Nintendo Will Build and Open a Museum Dedicated to Their History in 2023/2024

You’ve probably heard it before, but did you know that Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card manufacturer? Nintendo was known as The Nintendo Playing Card Company for much of its early history, and though they’ve spent the last 40 years as one the best video game developers in the world, they still produce playing cards and hanafuda cards to this day.

All this history will soon be on display for the public as Nintendo has announced plans to repurpose one of their shuttered manufacturing plants in Kyoto to construct the Nintendo Gallery, a museum dedicated to all their wonderful toys and games.

Scheduled for completion during Nintendo’s 2023 fiscal year (which runs from April 1, 2023 through March 31, 2024), the Nintendo Gallery will feature “exhibits and experiences” that highlight the company’s “product development history and philosophy.”

Nintendo doesn’t have any specific plans for the museum as of yet, but an artist’s rendering of what the facility might look like is pictured above.

Embracer Group is Starting a Games Archive

Embracer Group, the many-tentacled parent company of THQ Nordic, Deep Silver, Gearbox, and a half-dozen other publishing labels, has announced plans to open a video game archive in Karlstad, Sweden.

While lots of publishers are extremely thorough about preserving production assets, prototypes, and source code for the games they create, what Embracer is doing with their archive is fairly unique.

Using CEO Lars Wingefors’s personal game library as a starting point, Embracer has built a collection containing over 50,000 different games, consoles, and accessories. You can see the “secret” underground vault that houses the collection (and a portion of the games) in this new video featuring the archive’s Game Historian, Martin Lindell:

The archive’s collection currently stretches all the way back to the launch games for the Magnavox Odyssey, and Embracer’s goal is to obtain the European, American, and Japanese editions of every game ever made:

For us, games are more than just games. It is culture. It is something created by great people with creative ideas. By building a large games archive, we want to preserve and tribute the gaming culture for a long period of time.

The journey has already begun and it is time to take the next step. Our goal is clear – We want to archive and display as much of the video game industry as possible. Hopefully you will join us on our journey.

The Embracer Group Games Archive isn’t open to the public yet, but they hope to welcome researchers in the near future as the archive becomes more accessible.

Super Mario Bros. Speedrunners Inch Closer to Perfect Run With Record Time of 4:54.948 from Niftski

Thanks to the wonders of emulation software, speedrunners have discovered that the optimal path through Super Mario Bros. can be completed in just four minutes and 54.032 seconds. This is known as a “Tool Assisted Speedrun” (TAS), which breaks the gameplay down into individual frames and reassembles them to determine exactly what a perfect run looks like.

Normally, human players can’t get compete with the times posted by a TAS, but the speedrunning community is doing their best to match the machines.

Case in point, Niftski just broke the 4:55 barrier for an “Any Percentage” run by completing Super Mario Bros. in a blistering four minutes and 54.948 seconds. Kyle Orland compared this feat to the four-minute mile on Ars Technica in a great primer on the various tricks and glitches the speedrunner exploited to secure the record.

While Niftski is now the owner of the fastest time for Super Mario Bros., his achievement does come with an asterisk. Instead of using an NES console and controller, he set the record using a keyboard attached to a PC running an emulated version of the game. The speedrunning community as a whole considers that a legal option, but many individual speedrunners prefer to stick with original hardware.

The previous “Any Percentage” record for Super Mario Bros. was four minutes and 55.23 seconds, which was set by Miniland in February.

Congratulations to Niftski, who plans to continue chasing Super Mario Bros. immortality in the future. A perfect run is certainly possible, and you can follow all his subsequent speedrunning efforts on Twitch.

Sealed and Graded Copy of Super Mario Bros. Sells for an Astonishing $660,000

I am endlessly fascinated by the people who spend obscene amounts of money on retro video games. Especially because it wasn’t all that long ago that game shops weren’t even interested in games for “obsolete” consoles like the NES or the Atari 2600.

At the time, my pristine used copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! might have fetched a few dollars at a garage sale. However, in today’s market, a CIB (that’s “Complete In Box”) copy of the game can net you more than $1,000. But even that’s chump change compared to a game sale that just closed at Heritage Auctions. According to the auction house, some unnamed person is now the proud owner of a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros.

And all it cost them was… wait for it… $660,000.

That puts it well beyond the previous record-setting price paid for a single game (a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 that sold in November for $156,000), as well an earlier sale of Super Mario’s first NES adventure that went for $140,000. It’s also more than double the $300,000 that Pets.com founder Greg McLemore paid for the Nintendo PlayStation prototype in March 2020.

This copy of Super Mario Bros. was graded 9.4 A+ by Wata Games and comes from the title’s fourth printing, which is notable for its lack of the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s also missing the trademark symbol that would be added to the right of the “Nintendo Entertainment System” branding on later printings:

Not only is this the finest plastic-sealed copy with a perforated cardboard hangtab we’ve ever offered of any black box title, it is also the oldest sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. we’ve ever had the opportunity to offer. This is only the fourth version of Super Mario Bros. ever produced, and its window of production was remarkably short.

Just to paint a better picture of how short this really was — the nationwide release for the console came in mid to late 1986, and black box games distributed for that release did not have the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s worth mentioning that Nintendo managed to add the trademark symbol to the Nintendo Entertainment System on their game boxes by the beginning of 1987. That certainly doesn’t leave much time at all for this variant to be produced in-between the two!

Retro game collecting is certainly going to some wild places, and it’s probably only a matter of time until somebody ponies up more than a million dollars for a single game.

A Sealed Copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 Just Sold for $156,000

It happened again.

Heritage Auctions has announced they’ve sold another classic NES game for six figures, which set a new record for the price paid for a single video game.

This time, the company sold a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 for $156,000, eclipsing the previous records set for an auction sale ($114,000 for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. in July) and a private sale ($140,000 for a different sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. in August).

According to Heritage, this copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 fetched such a high price because of three reasons. Obviously, it’s factory sealed, which is very important to collectors. But it’s also graded (a 9.2 A+ on Wata Games’s scale) and it’s from a rare earlier printing that pushes the “Bros.” in the logo to the left side (normally it’s on the right between Mario’s hat and the rest of the logo).

$156,000 is quite a lot of money for one video game, but is a $200,000 sale next?

A “Stock Market For Collectibles” Plans to Sell Shares in a Record-Breaking Sealed Copy of Super Mario Bros.

Just last month, Heritage Auctions sold a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for $114,000, which set a new record for the sale price of a single game. But what we didn’t know was that another sealed copy of the game had already been sold for $140,000 in a private sale a month before that.

According to Ars Technica, that particular copy of Super Mario Bros. was purchased by Rally, a company that calls itself a “stock market of collectibles,” and what they plan to do with their new acquisition sounds wild.

Beginning next Friday, August 21, Rally will sell 3,000 “shares” in their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $50 apiece (which will raise the valuation of the game to $150,000). Like a publicly-traded stock, users can buy and sell those shares on the site’s marketplace, or cash out when an advisory board decides to sell the game to a collector.

In addition to the factory seal, this copy of Super Mario Bros. is nearly pristine, and has received a 9.8 A+ from Wata Games:

Still, Wata Games says this is one of only 14 factory-sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. it has seen among the so-called “hangtab” editions, which feature a hanger slot on the back that was removed from production lines around September 1987. Among that rarefied group, Wata says this is the “single highest graded sealed copy” it has seen, earning a 9.8/10 for box quality and a near-perfect A+ for the shrinkwrap seal on Wata’s scale.

“This is the first time that such an early print with a grade of 9.8 A+ has ever been offered for sale,” Wata Games President Deniz Kahn said in a statement. “This is the 1-of-1 highest graded copy of Super Mario Bros. in existence, considered by many collectors to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of the hobby. It’s the Action Comics #1 of video games.”

This is Rally’s first foray into purchasing collectible video games, but they’re excited for the chance to branch out from their previous focus on acquiring rare trading cards, watches, cars, and comic books.

“Over the last year or so we’ve heard from our members and have observed the industry grow, and it’s clear that there is a community that believes in both the financial and emotional value of these games and wants access to invest in them,” [Rally VP of Operations Fitz] Tepper told Ars Technica. “We’ve seen this demand from asset classes already on the platform, like sports memorabilia, trading cards, or collector cars and are now thrilled to add video games to that list.”

Tepper went on to say that this is just the first video game purchase Rally plans to make, and that the company is currently looking to obtain copies of The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, Stadium Events, GoldenEye 007, and Halo: Combat Evolved as well.

The National Videogame Museum is Collecting Stories About Playing Animal Crossing During Lockdown

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone indoors, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was trending towards a massive launch. But I’m not sure anyone expected it to break as big as it did.

Nintendo has always played the long game, and they attracted a small, but very devoted, community between 2001 and 2017 after releasing four games (and a handful of spinoffs) in the Animal Crossing franchise. But after only four months, the consolemaker has already sold more than 22.4 million copies of New Horizons, making it one of bestselling games on the Switch (it currently trails only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe).

New Horizons promised players colorful island vistas and adventurous travel to faraway lands, so a lot people jumped at the chance to escape from the real world for a few hours every night. From there it exploded into an outburst of creativity, billions of requests for good turnip prices, celebrity sightings (including Elijah Wood, Danny Trejo, and multiple high end fashion designers), and a talk show hosted by Rogue One screenwriter Gary Whitta. In short, it was the right game at the right time.

The United Kingdom’s National Videogame Museum will attempt to capture this unique moment in gaming history with their next project, The Animal Crossing Diaries. Players from around the world will be able to submit stories about how they played Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the pandemic, which will help the NVM in their goal to “record for the first time a highly meaningful but ephemeral and intangible experience through the perspective of its players”:

This new collection will focus on the cultural phenomenon that followed the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch in March 2020, just as the world was transformed by the pandemic. This videogame rapidly became an international sensation in which millions of players have been creating and managing their own tropical island along with a cast of talkative animal neighbours. The game became an important social and creative outlet for people unable to socialise in person during lockdown.

This innovative online exhibition will open up new ways of collecting and archiving videogame histories, and record for the first time a highly meaningful but ephemeral and intangible experience through the perspective of its players.

Iain Simons, Director of Culture for the NVM, said “Animal Crossing is the perfect experience for a lockdown. The coincidental timing of its release provided a welcome relief for millions of people who wanted to go outdoors but couldn’t, who wanted to meet friends but weren’t allowed. It’s no surprise that this incredibly creative, social space became a safe haven for millions during this turbulent year.”

Please visit TheNVM.org to learn more about future updates and events related to The Animal Crossing Diaries.