It was yet another normal Sunday evening in the lair of Superjustinbros and after a delicious homemade cheeseburger dinner with baked fries on the side, I decided to tune into one of my favorite Twitch streamers Vinny “Binyot” Vinesauce for his weekly Sunday stream. The theme of the first segment was on fan-created ports, remakes and re-imaginings of popular games, ranging from silly memes/jokes made for a good laugh to genuinely fantastic efforts that I would personally recommend to anyone. One of the games featured in the segment would catch my attention, and not for the reasons one would initially think.
Enter Multicartverse, a SMB1-style crossover game starring Mario, Sonic, Link, Pac-Man, and various popular characters from the bootleg gaming community. Somari is there. Kung Fu Mari is there, and who else but 7 Grand Dad in his iconic caveman garb to round out the roster. As for the game itself, Multicartverse is inspired by the likes of Super Mario Bros. Crossover and Super Mario Boil, featuring Mario level design mixed with Sonic gameplay, although the level design doesn’t give you much of an opportunity to really experiment with high-speed platforming. Audio-wise, everything is based wholesale on the Genesis and the famous Yamaha YM2612 that helped it produce many-a-soundtrack during its heyday, featuring custom Genesis remixes of various different Mario and bootleg songs. The game also has something of a sense of humor: beyond the NPC's hanging out near the closed-up warp zone in the second stage, three of the five options on the main menu are essentially jokes: "Watch a Movie" plays a clip of Mario in Garry's Mod firing various weapons with all sorts of silly sounds/effects, "Fart Button" is, well, take a guess, and "Play a Better Game" loads a joke game re-creating the "SO RETRO" meme.
In spite of its large roster of characters, colorful spritework, and potential for further development, the game didn't really take off and only had a single beta titled Ver. 0.0.1. And you can kind of feel this in the gameplay itself: Around half the roster are clones or skins of existing characters, others are missing moves that one would expect the characters to have (Kirby has no inhale feature and "Fred" cannot use his club to attack as examples). The Sonic characters and Somari's extreme speed and floaty physics can find themselves at odds with the Mario-inspired level design (it's really easy to trigger a dash and launch yourself forwards, then wall jump repeatedly off walls trying to maintain control). And the Tetromino (yes, the Tetromino is a playable character here too) has no way to interact with ? blocks and will find itself taking damage trying to hard drop onto enemies to stomp them. My Windows 11 computer also caused other performance hiccups during my time playing Multicartverse, lagging the game if played on too high of a resolution and making Stage 4 pretty much impossible due to speeding up the autoscroller to the point no character can traverse it fast enough. The game's developer, now known as Mtgames, acknowledges many of Multicartverse's shortcomings in a blog post on the game's itch.io page describing why the game never made it past the Ver. 0.0.1 demo. In short, losing the game's files pretty much did the game in, dooming it to obscurity until the “Sauce Man” discovered it and exposed the game to several thousand people. And even with its newfound time in the sun, there is no interest in continuing development, all for understandable reasons of course.
Playing Multicartverse for myself, I was fascinated by the game's jank and all of the ways you could mess around with the movesets of the characters and the game’s very wild movement and jumping physics to blaze through entire levels and smash through enemies along the path. Of course, the game not being optimized for Windows 11 prevented me from getting the full experience until I pulled out my Windows 7 and downloaded it there, and in that case it was mostly to slow the autoscroller in Stage 4 down to manageable levels so I could get a taste of the final boss. All of the levels were fairly short overall and semi-remakes of SMB1 levels, but Stages 1 and 2 were probably the best levels of the package as they worked perfectly with the faster characters while still giving the slower, more balanced cast members some obstacles to platform around and enemies to stomp. Practically the only character on here that I’d say was “missing” on the roster was The Hummer, the horse mascot of Hummer Team and the original creator of Somari, though the game already has enough Sonic clones as is.
But we all know why we’re here: The soundtrack. You know it was the reason I got invested into this game to begin with, and I know I cannot turn down some good Mega Drive/Sega Genesis-style music whenever it be original songs or remixed from other sources. So later in the week that I discovered Multicartverse, I downloaded the game and grabbed recordings of all the songs I could, migrating to my Windows 7 for a brief period to grab the boss theme as there was no way I was recording it on my main machine. The final result is a 16-track soundtrack featuring song rips of all the menus, the four main stages, an extra bonus stage, and several joke modes/screens. One song (for one of the joke modes) is taken wholesale from the bootleg Genesis game Sonic Jam 6, but since it still fits with the theme of Multicartverse, I included it as a bonus track. Since credits on the game and who made what are mostly non-existent, I opted to simply credit the album’s songs to “GreenSun Games” for the time being.
With all that said, here is the download.
I should make it clear that this rip was done with incomplete research so the actual song names and artist tags are not 100% set in stone. If the true names for each song/song author are supplied, I will update the download with updated tags. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some conventions to prep for...
