Nintendo’s Super Mario trailed the videogame industry from “going to die soon” to “where’s my latest million dollars, you sexy thing?” by becoming one of the greatest commercial successes of the sector. Not only that, it was in fact so popular that it crossed the kids’ room’s door to attain the status of pop-cult, up to the point where colleges were having live action shows featuring the Nintendo franchise’s gameplay.
Super Mario is also one of the first games that users look for when they put their hands on a NES emulator. Those old cartridges have been ripped more than once to offer the real thing on a ROM dump. Platform games reminiscent of SM are a common exercise for those who learn game and graphic programming, and thus Mario clones exist in virtually any language.
But there was stil a barrier to break.
Some folk has managed to make Super Mario fit in a 14kB Javascript applet. That’s right kids, you only need your browser to play it, and by “only your browser” I don’t mean “your browser, and Flash, and Java, and 13 different image compression formats, and your firewall turned off”. In 35kB of JS code (then reduced to 14 thanks to optimization software) you have graphics, base64-encoded MIDI music, keyboard control and all the stuff.
Ok, it’s sluggish on certain machines and/or browsers, it’s just one level, there are no mushrooms and no Koopas, and at the end of the day you fall in the white without hitting any flag. That’s not the point. This is a lesson to every self-acclaimed hacker. This is hacking, kiddos. This version of SM is W3C compliant! (Well, it may be in a non-impossible future). You can play it on any Web machine.
Now he only has to make a JavaScript version of GTA IV. Possibly under 80kB, oh, and I want it responsive! I don’t want to be busted because the bullet’s div’s margin wasn’t set to zero.
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