When Nintendo launched the Game Boy in Japan on April 21, 1989, a jump ‘n’ run based on the company mascot Mario was a must to mark the launch of the new handheld. The Japanese had set new standards in jumping games, especially with Super Mario Bros (1985) and Super Mario Bros 3 (1988) for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), so that their own Mario game for the Game Boy was practically mandatory.
While the Game Boy came onto the market in the USA at the end of July 1989, we Europeans had to wait until September 28, 1990 – and therefore almost a year and a half for Super Mario Land. Unless you had already imported the handheld and game, which was financially impossible for me as a student.
After finally convincing my parents of the importance of a Game Boy, I received the handheld for Christmas 1990 along with Tetris and Super Mario Land. In the first few months, however, I almost only played Tetris, so it wasn’t until the summer of 1991 that I got serious about Super Mario Land.
For me it was the second Mario platformer. Until then, I had only gotten to know and love Super Mario Bros for the NES from a friend: pixel-perfect controls, fantastic level design, cool power-ups and lots of secrets.
However, Super Mario Land was completely new to me. Also the short test report in my favorite magazine Power Play, which covers the game in issue 4/90 rated with a whopping 88 percentage points, gave me hardly any information about the game:
“Mario is alive. In Super Mario Land he has to pass four levels with three sections each. The gameplay largely corresponds to that of Super Mario Bros. There are some new extras and a shooting game interlude in the Gradius style. Like the other Super Mario games The Game Boy version is also brilliant.”
So I plunged into the adventure without any prior knowledge. I remember playing through Super Mario Land for the first time in its entirety on a beach in the south of France on a hot July day during my summer vacation in 1991 – and finding it almost as awesome as Mario on the NES.
What I didn’t like, however, was the lack of a save function, which gave me a little sunburn on my first complete playthrough. If you wanted to complete Super Mario Land, you either had to complete it in one go or pause the game and then leave the Game Boy on. Passwords to continue playing at a certain point were also not offered.
Typically Super Mario, but different
The lack of storage options wasn’t the only difference between Super Mario Land and the NES Marios. It started with the development team: While Super Mario Bros 1 to 3 were created under the leadership of Shigeru Miyamoto, the Nintendo Research & Development 1 department (Nintendo R&D1 for short) around Gunpei Yokoi, who acted as producer, was responsible for Super Mario Land .
Yokoi had been employed by Nintendo since 1965 and had invented numerous hardware innovations for the company over the years, including the Game & Watch series popular in the 1980s and the classic NES controller. However, his masterpiece was the invention of the Game Boy. So it was only logical for Nintendo to put him in charge of Super Mario Land.
To adapt the game to the limited capabilities of the Game Boy, Yokoi and his team, which included Satoru Okada (Metroid, Kid Icarus) as director, made some design changes from the home console version.
Above all, the scope of the game was kept relatively small with the aforementioned four levels with three sections each – so small that experienced players could easily play through Super Mario Land in less than an hour.
Even with the numerous and imaginative designed opponentswhich Nintendo R&D1 partly completely reinvented for Super Mario Land, as well as the extras, there were some innovations.
While the power-up mushroom continued to transform the standard Mario into a slightly larger character who could take an enemy hit without immediately dying, the 1-up mushroom from Super Mario Bros, which gave the player an additional life , now give way to a little heart.
This change had a technical background: in Super Mario Bros, power-up mushrooms were red and 1-up mushrooms were green. So they were identical but color-coded symbols. But since the Game Boy displayed graphics in monochrome green-black, Yokoi and Co. had to come up with this trick.
Additionally, Super Mario Land no longer had a fire flower to shoot flaming balls with. Instead, they collected the so-called Superball flower, whose fired projectiles bounced off platforms at an angle of 45 degrees and bounced over them.
Video: Nintendo Game Boy – a quick review
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On the one hand, you could tactically eliminate opponents, but on the other hand, you could also collect coins. If you grabbed a star after a courageous jump onto a block, Mario was, as usual, invincible for a short time.
Otherwise, Super Mario Land played very similarly to the NES version: you jumped from left to right over platforms and objects that were sometimes floating and rotating, and got enemies out of the way by jumping on their heads or shooting them with the super balls the power-ups in question and received an extra life for collecting 100 coins.
Like Super Mario Bros, there were also hidden level passages and a time limit per section, but at 400 seconds it was so generous that it didn’t cause me any problems at the time. There was also a final boss waiting at the end of each of the four worlds.