The state of Super Mario Bros. Special in 2023

While I’ve had a great ordeal of interests over the years, some of which have come and gone, one video-gaming interest I’ve always had strong opinions of is the 2D side-scrolling platformer. And since I’ve been looking for more content to fill this blog up during my quest for productivity, I decided to revisit an entry I made *checks notes* 12 years ago?!

Yeah, we’re talking about this little number again. Released only in Japan by Hudson Soft for two home computers of the early 80’s, the NEC PC-88 and the Sharp X1, Super Mario Bros. Special was one of two offshoots of the original Super Mario Bros and was published only a short time after what would be called The Lost Levels outside Japan. And unlike Lost Levels, which would be exported outside of Japan in various formats and became the “Game B (Hard Mode)” of the Game and Watch Super Mario Bros unit created to celebrate Mario’s 35th Anniversary, Special remained pretty much entirely unknown to the rest of the world and was stunk in legal limbo due to the awkward circumstances of its release (being on two obscure Japanese-only computers and Nintendo only licensing the game instead of taking part in its creation).

When Special was first discovered and gained traction in the regions that originally didn’t get the game towards the back half of the 2000’s thanks to the internet, it would gather a very divided opinion, a fate that also fell over the Lost Levels but for different reasons. The PC-88 version was lambasted on first impressions for its very garish and limited color palette, leaning heavily on red and orange tiles against a harsh blue backdrop for outdoor and castle levels. The Sharp X1 version, by contrast, was able to make use of a greater range of color and had something of a warmer reception but it still felt like a step down from the NES original even with some enemies using more colors than they could on the NES. Both versions would also gain criticism for their poor controls and physics, inconsistent speeds, and the lack of proper scrolling. Whenever these color choices, in particular those of the the PC-88 version, were done for compatibility or performance, they were a far cry from the original color scheme of Super Mario Bros.

Players that were willing to hop in and brave the less than desirable aesthetics came across a very unique experience unlike SMB1 or The Lost Levels. With more creative uses of SMB1’s assets, new secret items to discover, and a few more surprises in the level designs, Hudson Soft would create a very unique and often overlooked take on Nintendo's flagship title of 1985. That said, many design choices and limitations would drag down the overall experience, especially compared to the timeless status of the original game it was based on, implying the game may have been rushed to some extent:

• Despite the “Bros” moniker, there is no option to play as Luigi, either through two player mode or a character select.
• As noted above, the PC-88 version only uses 4 colors total, half of the 8 colors the system can display at a time (not including dithering effects) and looks too garish for its own good, even if I do un-ironically prefer it to the more colorful Sharp X1 version. It relies too heavily on reds and oranges, even if the sprites and tiles would be capable of using olive, a color much closer to the many greens and browns in SMB1’s palette.
• The Japanese computers the game released on were not capable of the same kind of smooth scrolling you could get on the Famicom or NES. A form of scrolling is possible on both machines, but it’s a very choppy tile by tile scrolling. Maybe it would have been preferable to the screen flip-scrolling but it would still not be the ideal and smooth scroll type you would want in a side scrolling platformer (at least one designed with the NES in mind).
• Some of the levels in the later half of the game look or play too close to levels from vanilla SMB1 and don’t go as crazy with the reduced limitations of the layouts and set pieces of the format as they could have. 5-4 is a loose translation of SMB1 2-4 and 5-4, 6-1 is mostly copied from SMB1’s version of the same level, as is 6-2, and 7-1 hits similar beats as SMB1’s version aside from the unique bonus rooms and the end-level staircase. Compare this to the likes of the first two castles which have bonus rooms set underground and in the overworld, 3-1 featuring underwater tiles in an overworld level, and 4-2 having two entrances to its underground section and an Easter egg if one jumps the flagpole.
• The new powerups are very well-hidden with almost no hints to their locations and are very seldom-used with only one or two appearances per powerup. Except for the hammer and clock, they are not placed in spots where they would be useful.
• For years, the PC-88 version was plagued with being run on a “bad dump” that blanked out the screen as it loads in the next part of the current level, making it harder to anticipate oncoming terrain. This bad dump also resulted in the infamous “IPL Switch” that locked you out of the final level.
• The fourth world in particular was victim to some oversights that would result in soft locks: 4-2 had a nonfunctional Warp Zone, and 4-3 had platforms mandatory to progress that would not load in due to the game being overloaded on platforms on the current screen and— perhaps even more infamously, a bonus room with a broken exit.

In the years since I made my initial post on Super Mario Bros. Special, more people would discover the game and expose it to an even wider audience, though it pretty much remained relevant only to bigger Mario/SMB1 fans, emulation communities, and collectors and enthusiasts of rarer consoles and home computers. With the circumstances around its release preventing Nintendo from bringing it back on current-generation hardware, it remained an oddity that those outside of Japan would only get to experience through emulation. It wouldn’t be until 2022, 12 years after I first heard of and played Special, that I had the experience of playing the game on one of the two computers it originally released for.

Yup, your eyes do not deceive you; what you see in front of your very eyes is in fact a real, working Sharp X1 at last year’s Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. And the game was still as sluggish to play on real hardware as it is on emulators. The overly blurry CRT monitor does miraculously make the graphics and colors look nicer overall, but it didn’t make me want to rush out and buy a whole Sharp X1 computer and a copy of the game when I can get a similar experience on emulators without having to invest a stupidly huge amount of money. Especially when the game and its associated machine were never released in the US to begin with. When the setup returned a year later at LIRetro 2023, the monitor had to be swapped out, resulting in a darker and muddier screen than before (with the only positive being that it completely masks any dithering on screen, almost). Ironically, a homebrew port of SMB1 on the Commodore 64 (video here), which was also being demoed at the same event on real hardware, was capable of fully replicating the feel and speed of the original NES game with only minimal slowdown and none of the chop-style scrolling that plagued both the PC-88 and Sharp X1 versions of Special.

Since discovering Super Mario Bros. Special for the first time in around 2010 or so, I randomly decided to remake the entire thing in Mario Builder, a very old Super Mario Maker precursor of sorts, in order to make the levels of Special playable in a better engine. Unfortunately, Mario Builder was filled with minor and major glitches and a large plethora of nonexistent QoL features to make making levels and full games easier, causing me to abandon the “Restoration Project” after only one level, World 1-1, was made. It was probably not worth it anyways in the long run since Mario Builder's physics were kind of messy and it was not possible to change the game's assets to resemble NES SMB1, meaning had the project gotten made, there would be an extreme artstyle clash with 16-bit SMB3 graphics in 8-Bit SMB1 levels, and the Bowser encounters would have just been the Koopalings on the Bowser Bridge in the first seven worlds followed by Bowser himself destroying himself by smashing the bridge.

Before my original decision to remake Special in the Restoration Project, and part of what inspired me to start it in the first place, was a level hack of the original Super Mario Bros. in 2008 that converts the levels to match Special’s layouts, leading to what would start a trend of modern remakes or remasters across the 2010’s and even into the 2020’s, as we’ll see later. The 2008 NES mod, by Frantik and Levi “Karatorian” Aho, was stock SMB1 programing and level design limitations, leading to many of the unique attributes of Special’s levels that wouldn’t be possible on the NES/FDS being excluded and the broken warps in World 4 being kept intact, but it would be the first time the levels would be playable outside their original platforms, even if they weren’t presented in the same way.

In 2012, Stabyourself’s Mari0, the SMB1 fan game that gives you a portal gun, was released, and one of the earliest map pack projects following up from a port of Lost Levels was a full conversion of Special. It was a collaborative effort, with eight users chosen to convert one of the eight worlds each and send them in to be checked for authenticity and accuracy, with yours truly being one of the project’s leaders. The final result was a very close remake of the levels of SMB Special, but with some small changes to take into account the heavier gravity of jumps, lack of Special’s enemies/items, and other limitations of Mari0’s level design formats. Unlike most of the projects that would aim to recreate Special, the Mari0 conversion allowed one to experience both the PC-88 and Sharp X1 versions, compared to most of these recreations that would take the X1 version’s graphics and visuals over the PC-88 version thanks to its better-utilized and versatile color palette.

The following year, all of Super Mario Bros. Special would be added to Exploding Rabbit’s Super Mario Bros. Crossover starting from Version 3.0, alongside the Lost Levels. This version was based on the Sharp X1 version and included matching Sharp X1 skins for every featured character, including Luigi, finally letting one play as Mario’s brother with his Lost Levels physics in the Super Mario Bros. Special levels proper. As part of the new difficulty system, Easy and Hard versions of Super Mario Bros. Special’s levels were created, featuring new and imaginative takes on Special’s levels to ease up on some difficult aspects of the original or provided a “What If” if Hudson Soft decided to make Special as hard as many people describe The Lost Levels.

By 2015, Nintendo would launch its own Mario level editor with Super Mario Maker, and in no time flat, Special’s levels would be recreated for it by a dedicated user named Forteblast. While it’s not without its own inaccuracies to the source material given the whole point of the editor is to be accessible to anyone interested in designing Mario levels, it does a pretty good job, even if it has to get creative with replicating the new enemies, like placing a Spiny on a Koopa Paratroopa to mimic the Fighter Fly, or placing a Spiny upside-down in a tiny alcove in the ceiling to replicate the icicles. When Super Mario Maker 2 launched, it too got a few Special ports, although from my understanding and from what I’ve seen online they don’t match the first game’s ports and weren’t created by Forteblast.

To my absolute shock, Frantik, one of the creators behind the NES port from 2008, would return to give the NES port a full overhaul in 2021. Dubbed the “35th Anniversary Edition”, this version set out to give the NES a truer-to-the-text conversion of the Sharp X1 version, resulting in a more accurate port with all the original Special-exclusive enemies and items intact, (almost) all of the unique level design elements not seen in the original game or Lost Levels preserved, and the ability to switch the game’s palette between a custom recreation of the Sharp X1’s color palette (which is what you see on the left) and the original NES color palette. The full credit scroll ending of Special is even included, now completely proofread and error-free with accurate translations of the Japanese enemy names. The only feature I would consider missing from this new version of Special on NES would be Luigi, either as a second player option or an alternate choice with different physics. Sure it’s accurate to the original not to feature him, but it would have been appreciated to have him featured in some form as a neat extra, especially since you could play as Luigi in SMB’s Crossover’s conversion of Special, as well as in Lost Levels, the true sequel to SMB1 (at least in Japan).

And that’s where SMB Special stands today. Despite the best efforts of the team at Hudson to create a SMB1-like experience for home computers (a trait that would continue well into the 90’s on MS-DOS computers), Special never really took off and mostly remained a curiosity at best, killing Hudson’s brief partnership with Nintendo to bring their NES and arcade hits to Japanese computers. The PC-88 and Sharp X1 continued on without any presence of Nintendo, getting successors in the form of the PC-98 and Sharp X68000 respectively. Hudson would jump ship to home consoles once the PC Engine launched in Japan, leaving the PC scene behind aside from a few odd releases until they would get bought out and absorbed into Konami at the beginning of the 2010’s. Nowadays, and with no word or possibility of an official re-release, people would keep Special alive through gameplay footage on Youtube and by porting the game’s levels into games/engines that are more adept at handling the fast-paced platforming of Nintendo’s original Super Mario Bros, allowing those new to discovering Special and its history to experience the definitive version of Hudson Soft’s take on the Super Mario Bros. formula.

If you want to see a more in-depth look at Super Mario Bros. Special, I strongly recommend this Basement Dwellers video, since it encouraged me to go and finish up this blogpost and provided a lot of interesting and useful information regarding the game and why many of its design choices were made.