A place for those who "Trust the Fungus"

tygerbug wrote:Forgotten Nintendo Games: The unreleased Super Famicom/SNES title Super Mario Bros. The Movie was intended for a Christmas 1993 release and was based (loosely) on the Bob Hoskins-starring film. Unusually for a Mario title, the game was developed not by Nintendo but by the California-based studio Visual Concepts, with Ringler Studios handling the also-unreleased Game Boy version.

The simple platforming gameplay most closely resembles the original Super Mario Bros., albeit in a much darker, dystopic landscape. Similar to the then-popular Mortal Kombat series, actors were photographed as live-action video, and their likenesses then digitized into the game. Unlike Mortal Kombat, the game altered the actor likenesses to have "big heads" and be more cartoonish. The end result was somewhere between Mortal Kombat and Toshiba's Super Back to the Future 2. Live-capture footage was shot against blue screen during the shooting of the film itself, with actors including Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo, Samantha Mathis, Francesca Roberts and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles to some extent. However, the game does not closely follow the storyline of the film, taking equal inspiration from the first four Super Mario Bros. video games.

The opening cutscene is very cartoonish and shows Koopa (Dennis Hopper) riding a giant mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex and kidnapping Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis). Mario Bros. to the rescue! Or not. After the poor reception the Super Mario Bros movie received, Nintendo decided to shelve the game, and it was never publicly released. By all accounts an above-average platformer for the time, with an unusual visual style, we're still hoping for a ROM to leak …

superwesleybros wrote:Not sure if this is the right place for this but I just found this drawing.

pandacommando wrote:Sometime I still think about making something like this. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a programer so I never really got very far.

I thought I found a screenshot of a fan game based on the movie once, but it turned out to just be Photoshopped from some old batman game.

Redstar wrote:Awesome drawing, too, Wesley! Any source for the artist?

superwesleybros wrote:Not sure if this is the right place for this but I just found this drawing.

LBD_Nytetrayn wrote:I always thought that turning the hair red and adding the bushy eyebrows would go a long way.

1.) What inspired you to make a print based off the film?

The idea for Super Mario Bros. The Movie:The Game came from a discussion with one of my friends. The movie is so different to the games in almost every way, so our conversation was what if the games had been based on the movie? What if it was a small Japanese game studio had got the rights to this big Hollywood movie? What if the movie was the template for the game instead of vice-versa?

We had talked about this a few times before I made the piece as an entry for the Artboy Gallery in Melboune. They often hold fanart exhibitions, so I entered the piece into their exhibit at the EB Games Expo in Sydney last year. There's 2 versions of the piece; a straight up artwork piece and a box art for a SNES game.

2.) Did you use any particular games for inspiration or reference in designing the print?

I was using the classic NES/SNES box art style of the games for inspiration and reference. I wanted it to look similar to the Super Mario Bros. 3 artwork from the Japanese box, the one with Mario running into the foreground with Bowser and the Koopalings behind him. The artwork from the early games was a big influence. I tried to make the characters look like a cross between their game and movie counterparts. I'd actually love to see a Mario costume based on the movie in a game. I think it works really well in that style.

3.) What are your thoughts towards the film?

The first time I saw the film I must have 8 or 9 years old. I can't remember exactly when but it was being shown on TV as the Friday night movie. I was super excited for it, and being so young I guess I had no expectations of what a Mario movie should look like. I don't remember being disappointed by the film.

As an adult watching the film now I realise just how different it was to what I should have expected. It's very apparent Nintendo didn't have the clear vision for how this character and world should be as they do now. They were more allowing of people to take these characters and reinterpret them.


4.) Do you have any plans to make further artwork based on the film?

I'd really like to return to his piece and explore it further. Recently I've been doing a lot of pixel art work so if I get the time I'd like to return and figure what the actual game would look like. How would it work? Would it still be a side scrolling platformer? What would Mario's abilities be in this game?

Or what would this version of the franchise look like 20 years later?