Mario on the Internet – A Tribute to the early 2000s/2010s

Since the beginning of when the internet started to become mainstream, there was this thing called YouTube.

And then, people decided to post Super Mario-themed videos to it. Some of the more famous ones are “Super Mario Bros. Frustration”, a funny video where a guy rages at playing an objectively unfair Super Mario Bros. ROM hack, and then there’s “Super Mario Bros. Z”, basically an anime-influenced series that uses a lot of the Superstar Saga artwork style, and is really good, and “SMG4”, who actually grew his channel exponentially since his early days (see for yourself!), and everyone knows “Cute Mario Bros” and “Super Mario Logan”, both are just channels filled with plush videos (though one of them is definitely NOT for kids, I’ll let you guess…).

Hmm…what else? There were those “YouTube Poops” (funny and often satirical edits) made from Hotel Mario (mostly the cutscenes, not the gameplay itself) and the Super Mario World episode “Mama Luigi”. Those were the most popular, yes, but did you know that the first ACTUAL YouTube Poop created was from a “The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3” episode…edited as early as 2004 (even before YouTube came out)? Me neither!

Years later we got the first inception of “kaizo” levels (basically, extremely difficult ones compared to the official games) in 2007 with “Kaizo Mario World”, a ROM hack of Super Mario World you can still play to this day…if you wanted to.

Speaking of fan games, there were a lot created back in the day for people to play on their computers (I know I did!). Some were good, like the “Super Mario Flash” series or “Super Mario 63”, but then there were ones like “Mario Forever” (the bootleg one, not the actual fan game) or “Super Mario Flash Version 2”, where there’s unsettling visuals, blood, and basically things that don’t fit well with the Mario series, although I did kind of like “Mario Combat” (that’s the only exception).

Yes, fan games and fan projects that were created BEFORE Nintendo decided to take fan works down for no reason apart from “the characters are under copyright, not fair use apparently”, and before the Flash Player shut down. Some of them actually survived, but if you want to play them yourself, try to find a legitimate archive.

And, for some reason, said fan projects either always use the Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario World, or Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga sprite styles, and even have some characters from the first two Paper Mario games thrown in (because, why not?). I can’t wrap my head around it, but then again, there are a lot of strange things within the fandom.

Then, later on in say…the 2010s, more Mario stuff came, like a several dozen more fan games and fan fictions, “Dorkly” (more adult takes on Mario’s misadventures), “Unrealistic Mario” (exactly what it sounds like), and my personal favorite song, “Luigi’s Ballad” (if you don’t know this song, what are you doing in the Mario fandom?). There was even a “Mama Luigi” fan project that had several people re-animate the infamous episode. It was awesome, and it shows just how the Mario fans are really passionate when you think about it.

So, what was your favorite part with something Mario-related of the mid-2000s or 2010s? Mine has to be the Flash games.

(tl;dr – I go over as much history that I know about how the Super Mario series was handled by the fans of it back on the early days of the internet, and point out some highlighted projects that stuck out to me.)