#14: The Great Giana Sisters (Time Warp/Rainbow Arts, Commodore 64, 1987/1988)

Compare Giana with Mario and it falls short on just about every metric. The music isn’t nearly as catchy, the secrets aren’t so well constructed, and Giana herself just doesn’t have the physical presence of Mario; her jumps are much floatier, and there’s no satisfying bounce when you land on an enemy. And yet, there’s a real charm to it all the same. History, as we all know, is written by the victors, and it’s fairly clear who takes on that role in this particular fight. So let’s not kick a game when it’s down. Let’s not lambast Giana for being an imperfect copy of Mario. Imperfect copies are, after all, just how evolution works. Sometimes new ideas are just old ideas with a slight change. The changes here are slighter than most, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Instead of looking at it as a ripoff of Super Mario Bros., let’s consider The Great Giana Sisters as a game that wears its influences on its sleeve and see what new ideas it brings to the table.

First and foremost, the gender of the protagonist has been changed. This was, if we’re honest, probably not motivated by a socially conscious desire to increase female representation in gaming, so much as the need to alter the name of the game a little, because if you want to have any ground to stand on, legally speaking, you can’t actually call your Super Mario Bros. ripoff Super Mario Bros. So turn a bro into a sis, give her a different Italian name and change ‘super’ to an alliterative synonym. (Indeed, this follows a grand tradition of game rip-offs with names like Munchman, Super Invaders and Krazy Kong that make it clear exactly what they are without quite infringing copyright.) But the effect is, nonetheless, the same. The game has a female protagonist (or two, if you count Maria, the Luigi to Giana’s Mario). And with this, the storyline is also changed; there’s no damsel in distress for Giana to rescue, instead, the game is cast as something like an Alice in Wonderland narrative, where Giana has descended into a strange dreamworld, and must find her own escape. She is her own damsel, and she must rescue herself. And if her dreamworld happens to bear a striking resemblance to the Mushroom Kingdom of Super Mario Bros., well, perhaps Giana just played an awful lot of Mario before she went to bed.