Or, more accurately, How I Ignored The Lessons Super Mario World Tried to Teach Me Until Adulthood Wouldn’t Let Me Anymore
5th grade. On the school bus home. Every cool kid in the back section was talking about video games. Super Mario World, Mario Kart, Zelda, Mortal Kombat. Everyone had, or (like me and my brother) wanted, a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.
When it finally happened for me and my brother, on probably my favorite Christmas ever, I became a Nintendo kid. My best friend Chris next door was a Sega kid. So that worked out nicely for us. Rare was the kid in our world who had both.
Of the Nintendo kids, at least the ones on the back of our bus, nothing seemed so mythic, so epic as the words: “96 Star”.
Beating Super Mario World at 96 Star captured my attention like no other video game at the time.
The Map
At the core of my obsession was the map.
It’s safe to say almost everyone is familiar with how a Mario Bros video game works, but just to level set: you, the player, start a level moving left to right across the screen battling bad guys in the classic, 2D scroller style. Once you beat a level, you go onto the next.
In Super Mario World, you are rewarded 1 point for every level you beat, and for other accomplishments like hitting switches in palaces (not a rap reference), finding secret lands, or beating bosses.
But unlike many other 2D scrollers who just start the next level after the previous level has been beaten, the Super Mario World universe always brings you back to a map which satisfyingly opens up a path to the next level.
Sometimes a path opened up to two levels, going in opposite directions. Some paths ventured over bridges, up mountains, off to islands, or into caves.
Each group of levels was its own “land” (think continents), lands like “Yoshi’s Island”, “Donut Plains”, “Forest of Illusion” etc.
The wide-range of terrains and relative unpredictability of this map hit the main artery of my imagination.
Now, anyone could go straight through all the levels, one world after another in a direct, efficient path and defeat Bowser in his castle and say she “beat the game”. But Super Mario World offered secret levels only accessed by finding secret exits within the regular levels. These secret levels opened, satisfyingly (have I said that?), new pathways that veered from the straight-forward course.
There are 72 levels (not including Yoshi’s House and Top Secret Area), 24 of them have a secret exit for a total of 96 goals in the entire game and finding all of them will reap a reward. – Nintendo.Wikia
So now you have a World, a Universe as far as I could imagine, with not only multiple types of Lands that cover all types of terrain, but with secret pathways to secret lands.
The developers crafted their world so well it appeared endless, and I ran with that idea of endlessness to the edges of the Mario Earth.
It Was Just My Imagination
I imagined all sorts of different worlds, bad guys, secret paths, and hidden castles. Every day in class I daydreamed about what new obstacle I would encounter when I got home that night.
Anything seemed possible: rocks throwing fire at you, giants living in bean stalks, sea horses with lazer beams, a purple colored Yoshi that could run backwards.
I spent hours daydreaming of the sights I would see.
And so months went by.
Playing the game, talking about it on the bus, daydreaming about it at school. “96 star” kept repeating in my head, a mantra. As my excitement about the game grew and grew, my expectations reached unmanageable heights.
The Dream Ends
And then, anti-climactically, (that is to say, unsatisfyingly) the game came to an end.
One by one the Nintendo kids on the bus beat Bowser and none of us got 96 Star. We often enough got to a score of 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 before facing Bowser, but not 96. The game was over. We went our separate gaming ways. All before I ever got to see my flying unicorn worlds, dragons made of diamonds, and spiked manta rays hurling stardust explosions.
I came to two different realizations the day me and my brother beat Bowser in his castle.
Well, more realistically, the seeds of realization were sewn that day, the growth of which I would bitterly discourage until adulthood would force them into a sort of resigned, dispassionate bloomage.
Realization 1: The Pareto Principle
The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.[3]
In my current line of work, project management, we often use this short hand to say, “80% of all the work we have to do will only take 20% of the total hours on the project. The remaining 20% of the work (the devil in the details, getting into the weeds) will take the final 80% of the total hours for the project.”
The first thing I refused to learn from Super Mario World (that would’ve prepared me for adulthood) was that I would lose passion and interest in most projects when they most demanded my stamina and attention.
That one list to-do item that isn’t completely critical but is definitely “nice to have”? Not gonna do it.
Or, I’m going to put off doing it for an amount of time that would qualify as “really?”.
It seemed that the amount of work between 92 Star and 96 Star was roughly about the same as that between 10 Star and 92 Star.
In Super Mario World, the hardest, trickiest side-levels to access made up the difference between 100 hours of gameplay and 200 (we were kids), the same way life would eventually yield me my only small successes on the occasions I put in an a level of effort I was previously unfamiliar with.
And while I realized this, at a certain level of cognition, the same year I incompletely beat Super Mario World, I would spend years learning it the hard way, over and over.
Realization 2: Jack and Diane
Oh yeah, life goes on / Long after the thrill of living is gone
The second realization, and possibly the more tragic one, is that there is no real magic in the world, at least not the ways you imagine when you are told to follow your dreams as a child.
The world is not endless. It is end…ful?
Because you’re a kid and everything you do is new and exciting, you kind of think that everything will continue to be new and exciting.
My life would be a life full of deserts, jungles, and boss fights in castles, endless new discoveries.
Ironically, the only thing you are used to as a kid is the feeling of new experiences. Change is your constant.
And the first 15-20 levels of life are deceptive. They are the years when everything you do is the first time you’ve ever done it.
It doesn’t help the delusion that new abilities open up every level: driving at level 16, college and cigarettes at level 18, alcohol at level 21, confidence at level 30.
A Brief Aside for Depression
Things that, had I done them in college, might have helped me be whatever I wanted to be:
- Looking for an “Internship”
- Finding, or even looking for, a “Mentor”
- Thinking about how a “Major” might relate to getting a “Job”
Things that I did in college that did not help:
- Smoking weed and not talking to people
- Working on rap career
- Rejecting criticism about my writing because no one understood my genius
Depression is a hell of a drug, its most insidious feature may be how effectively it prevents its own cure.
Depression finds a way to convince you that you don’t deserve/need/want any one of the many simple steps it takes to start addressing your depressoin, let alone the rest of your life. Depression will tell you doing healthy, physical things won’t make your mind feel better, when (at least for mild to moderate depression) they will.
Depression will even go so far as to convince you it doesn’t exist in the first place.
The Success at School Fallacy
Like Super Mario World, school is set up to make you think life is a succession of pre-set levels. You succeed by studying hard and you are rewarded with a letter.
The only difference being that Super Mario World hands out numbers and studying, in this metaphor, means jumping on turtles who throw hammers at you.
Like life in school, after you beat one level, you move onto the next until one day you graduate by beating Bowser.
And then suddenly, there are no more levels.
What I didn’t know as a kid was that my imagination could dream up adventures that would take lifetimes to complete.
Hell, it even took Mario and Luigi hundreds of lives just to beat Soda Lake.
Adult life ends up being a lot more like jumping up to a sewer pipe sideways over-and-over than rescuing princesses and riding dinosaurs.
Heck, in adult life you’re lucky if you can even find the right sewer pipe to jump into…and they’re hiring for sewer jumpers right when you jump…and have enough experience for even an entry-level sewer pipe jumping job…and what they’re offering to pay a person who jumps into sewer pipes is a wage you can live off.
The further you go in life, and Super Mario World, the less paths become available. Certain worlds, you realize, will never come to fruition.
They Warned Me…
I wish they had mentioned this in the scrolling text that is your prize for saving the Princess at the end of Super Mario World.
Or maybe they did.
Maybe the fact that a scrolling text is your only prize for spending a hundred hours incompletely beating a game was the final lesson Nintendo tried to teach me about growing up: don’t do it for the prizes at the end, do it for the road full of fun that leads you there.
And try not to spend all your time on that road dreaming about other, more exciting roads that don’t actually exist.