Following my post on Super Mario 64, we’re jumping ahead a few years to the middle of 2001 and more Mario! It’s part of a big collaboration – more details at the bottom of the post…
With 81,000 Game Boy Advances sold in the UK on its opening weekend in June 2001, Nintendo claimed a new record here for the fastest selling console ever. A quarter of those who bought the new portable also bought the week’s biggest selling game, Super Mario Advance, alongside it. As a launch title, it was a success. Mario, star of many of Nintendo’s most popular games, was presumably an easy choice for the task. After the success of Super Mario Deluxe for the Game Boy Color, another remake made sense as a quick way of showing that the Game Boy Advance could do things that would never have been possible on any of its predecessors. Picking Super Mario Bros. 2 (the Doki Doki Panic one, not the intensely difficult Lost Levels one) as the game to remake into Super Mario Advance was a less obvious choice. They weren’t calling it the next in a Deluxe series, they didn’t go on to release Super Mario Bros. 3 next, and it’s much less widely celebrated than the Super Mario games that followed it. Nonetheless, it was a perfect fit for the Game Boy Advance launch for several reasons.
First is what I will call the ‘don’t release the obvious anthemic classic as the lead single ahead of your album’ approach. R.E.M. didn’t make “Everybody Hurts” a lead single. Linkin Park didn’t make “In the End” a lead single. Dua Lipa didn’t make “New Rules” a lead single. Likewise, people were going to want to get their hands on the successor to the Game Boy almost regardless of what games it had on it, and Nintendo had years ahead to fill GBA release schedules for. Holding back the favourites for a time when gaining attention was going to be a harder-fought battle made sense.
Second, for all that the Game Boy Advance could do a lot of things that its predecessor wasn’t capable of, it still wasn’t quite able to run the Super Mario Bros. games as they originally were either. Its smaller resolution meant that they had to be different, and choosing a less iconic entry meant that the chances of people getting hung up on that were lower. Adjacent to that is the suitability for the Advance version to get many new twists, with not just a Super Mario All Stars graphical reswizz and Super Mario Bros. Deluxe-style collectibles but other changes besides. It’s much easier to make a reimagining an attraction for a game that fewer people already knew and loved back-to-front. Newly giant vegetables? Sure, why not? When experimenting in the world of nostalgia, safer to do so with something where that well doesn’t run quite as deep and strong.
The other reasons Super Mario Bros. 2 is a great fit have everything to do with its particular peculiarities. The Game Boy had been home to bizarro takes on Mario, from the tiny, awkwardly heavy, wrong-music Mario of Super Mario Land through to games that turned everything so upside-down they had to go from Mario to Wario. To anyone who grew up on the Game Boy games, Super Mario Bros. 2’s weird world of the subconscious made at least as much sense as any other Mario game.
There’s more than that, though. Super Mario Bros. 2’s world of Subcon is a world full of doorways, much more so than the pipes of Super Mario Bros. or even the haunted houses of Super Mario Bros. 3. Subcon’s levels end in a bird’s mouth as doorway, a startling bit of imagery that it makes particularly good use of when one turns out to be a disguised enemy. Pots turn out to be doorways to a bigger-on-the-inside world. The fabric of the whole reality depicted in the game is thin. With strange potions that you pull up from the ground disguised as vegetables, you can create a doorway to another, shadow world in the place of your choosing. And what is a Game Boy Advance if not a new, improved way to open up a doorway to another world in the place of your choosing? Pick it up, take it with you, and you can open up a doorway to Subcon in your bedroom; in a hospital waiting room; on a tube train. As within, so without.
Top of the charts for week ending 23 June 2001:
UK games: Super Mario Advance (Nintendo, GBA) 
Japan games: タクティクスオウガ外伝 The Knight of Lodis / Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis (Atlus, GBA) 
UK films: Evolution 
UK singles: Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya & Pink – Lady Marmalade 
UK albums: Travis – The Invisible Band
Top of the charts for week ending 30 June 2001:
UK games: Super Mario Advance (Nintendo, GBA) 
Japan games:
Star Ocean: Blue Sphere (Tri-Ace/Enix, GBC)
UK films: Shrek 
UK singles: Hear’say – The Way to Your Love UK albums: Travis – The Invisible Band
Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more:
