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Mario is a rope over an abyss

February 26, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg

Many years ago, in 1991, I wrote about Nintendo’s Mario as an existential hero in an extended essay for the San Francisco Examiner, peppered with Nietzschean epigrams and marked with my own infatuation with these videogames’ worlds.

Now someone has produced a trilogy of short Flash films giving this concept animated life. These shorts rely on the crude pixelated sprites of the early Mario games, and derive their emotional charge mostly from heavy dollops of movie music. The spirit here may be more Ninja than Nietzsche, but I loved ’em.

Part one: The death of Luigi! Part two: Assault on the Mushroom Princess’s castle! Part three: Mario returns! Somehow, all this would sound better in Italian (“Il Ritorno di Mario!”).(Links courtesy Metafilter)

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