Super Mario Bros. & Friends: When I Grow Up - Merit Studios, 1991

Also refered to as Electric Crayon: The World of Nintendo, Super Mario Bros. & Friends is a little known entry in the Electric Crayon "virtual coloring book" series of DOS software. The game features a number of scenes of Mario characters doing different jobs that kids might want to do when they grow up. These scenes can then be colored in and later printed out, to the joy and amusement of all. And unlike Mario Paint, you can't accidentally color the outlines when you meant to fill in the one pixel wide space between Mario's fingers.

The game takes advantage of the 256-color VGA palette to give a pretty reasonable range of colors to work with. You can use one of the main colors seen at the bottom (and what an odd assortment it is), or select one and hit "mix" to bring up a number of different shades of the color you chose. Here you can see my attempt to make a semi-accurate representation of whatever scene in the Nintendo universe would involve Mario and Peach serving spaghetti to Link. I'm not really sure what Link's problem is there, but he looks like he's in the middle of Steve Martin's "may I go to the bathroom" bit from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And I pity the poor kids who actually want to be wait staff when they grow up.

Other careers represented include farmer, plumber (naturally), journalist, disc jockey (with DJ Mouser messin' up the mix), race car driver, astronomer, veterinarian (with Luigi examining Racoon Mario) and even homemaker. In a very PC twist, Mario, not Peach, represents that one. Maybe they should've split the difference and used Birdo. The pictures prepare children for what each profession is like; in ballet, you must be prepared for random Russian folk dancers to barge in on your practice sessions.

The single best image, however, has to be Bowser getting questioned on the witness stand by lawyer Mario, just for sheer absurdity. It only barely beats out Bowser chewing out Mario and Luigi over declining sales figures. Ultranerds may notice they used official game art as reference for the first Bowser, and the Mario cartoons for the second. Of course, I'm no nerd, so I didn't notice that at all.

Mario Teaches Typing - Interplay, 1992

The increasing prevalence of computers in the average home meant a whole generation now needed to learn how to type. Naturally, this was before the point everyone realized they could just type "hi qt c u l8r :)" and force the rest of the world to conform to their stupidity. Mavis Beacon had the market cornered for adults, so Interplay aimed at the younger bracket by bringing Mario onboard.

Mario Teaches Typing isn't much different from any other typing tutor software, except it has Mario in it. You've got three levels. Single keys, as seen here, features Mario doing a weird crouch jig while punching blocks and running into koopas to flip them over. The underwater level uses sleep-inducingly repetitive single words accompanied by Mario swimming around with what I can only assume is supposed to be a blooper. Finally, the third level uses full sentences to teach you about boring historical facts while Mario avoids thwomps and climbs through quicksand. A fourth area is simply called "practice", in which the challenge is to try to focus on typing while Mario stares into your soul and is very disappointed by the things he finds.

For no reason whatsoever, Mario Teaches Typing features exactly four voice samples. This was before Mario had an official voice, and they certainly weren't going to drag in Lou Albano or Walker Boone for five seconds of work, so hey, why not just get that intern to do his funny Italian voice. I realize that even the official voice is a stereotype, but at least it has some character. This just sounds like a rotund man in a spaghetti-stained wifebeater has leaned out of his second story window to encourage me to improve my keyboarding skills.

An updated version called Mario Teaches Typing 2 was released for Windows in 1996. Inexplicably, you can find a promo video for it at the Internet Archive.

Mario is Missing! - Software Toolworks, 1993

When you get the chance to develop a new game using a high-profile franchise, the tried-and-true method of making millions off your endeavor is to title your project The Main Character That You Like So Much Isn't Anywhere In This.

Mario is Missing! is basically Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, with the difference that you actually have a chance of beating it without keeping a dog-eared world almanac nearby. Unlike the Carmen series, you don't have to figure out where you're going, you only have to know where you are. Each door in Bowser's castle leads Luigi to a different city. Once there, you stomp koopa troopas to collect stolen artifacts, return them to their rightful places (answering a couple quiz questions about them in the process), and then call Yoshi to your location on the world map (once you determine where that is) to head back to the castle.

This game is the best looking of the lot here, using sprites and sounds taken straight from Super Mario World instead of someone's misshapen fanart. The original graphics are well done, especially the tourist photos Luigi takes on his journey instead of looking for his brother. A shame, then, that the game isn't very good. You spend most of your time running all over the map to find koopas to stomp, and the actual educational bits.. aren't.

Even for the younger kids I presume this is aimed at, it's really not hard to figure out where you are if you're visiting the Sydney Opera House or the Golden Gate Bridge. For the quizzes, you can make a good guess as to whether the Roman Colosseum was designed to hold 500 or 50,000 spectators. Even if you are somehow learning anything, it comes in the form of obscure trivia about the Buenos Aires Gaucho Museum.

Perhaps the only entertaining part of Mario is Missing is the remixes of Mario tunes, like this laid-back, metropolitan version of the Mario World theme. It's what the opening song would've been if Mario had starred in Frasier.

Mario's Time Machine - Software Toolworks, 1993

Three times as educational as Mario is Missing, but five times drier. Now you're not even afforded the luxury of hopping on enemies. The Nintendo connection was tenuous enough in the previous game, but now literally the only thing Nintendo related here is Mario and Bowser. Mario grabs items from Bowser's museum, sets his time machine to the date the artifact came from, does some surfing for some damned reason, then arrives at his destination to return the item. But the fun doesn't end there! You also have to fill in the blanks on an in-game worksheet, and this time the answers aren't so guessable.

Add to all this a timer that counts down while you're playing. Take too long on your homework and the game ends with Bowser escaping scot-free to relax on an island somewhere; you've still returned all the stolen stuff, though, so it's kind of a hollow victory for him. Get it all done in time and be treated to Bowser's time machine malfunctioning and sending him back millions of years where he is promptly crushed underfoot by a dinosaur, Jesus Christ.

It should be noted that both Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine also had NES versions. The only real differences for the NES Mario is Missing are simpler maps and looking like ass, but the NES Mario's Time Machine is practically a different game, with koopas and punchable blocks and a weird, simplified version of the old Mario Bros. arcade game.

Mario's Early Years - Software Toolworks, 1993 - 94

Software Toolworks gives it one more shake, this time aiming at kids too young to properly articulate how the game they're playing sucks. Mario's Early Years is the heading for three seperate games released for DOS and the SNES: Fun With Letters, Fun With Numbers, and Preschool Fun. They all play the same, and I suspect they're only seperated because the hefty number of voice samples in each would've been too big for a single cart.

In fact, the game is nothing but voice; highly compressed, chopped up voice. Each word and term was recorded seperately, which leads to lines that sound like "Show me. The. Things! Which are. The. Opposite of! Dry." Each game in the series is made of several minigames, consisting of clicking on whatever shape, number, color, or variety of Australian trap-door spider the little girl voice asks you to identify. They even bothered to put in SNES mouse support, which was nice of them. When you give the right answer, a weird, vaguely foreign old man voice proclaims "You found it!" or "I lke your choice!" or "I watch you in the bathroom!" I didn't get that last one recorded, but I swear I heard it.

Along with this voice, a character pops up on the screen with a simple animation (as a "reward", I suppose). Most of it is to be expected: a little piranha plant pokes out of a pipe, Yoshi's head rises up over some bushes in the background, etc. One of them, though, is just a hand appearing from behind a pipe with a popsicle. That's it. It waits for a moment, then retreats back behind the pipe, seemingly disappointed that kidnapping children isn't as easy as it appears in the movies. It's kind of creepy, but luckily one of the games also includes a picture of Bowser with a top hat and cane for no good reason to take your mind off things.

Hotel Mario - Philips Fantasy Factory, 1994

Part of the infamous series of Nintendo franchise titles that begrudgingly made an appearance on the multimedia abortion known as the Philips CD-i. As with the Zelda titles, Philips thought it best to throw out the qualities everyone knew and loved about the series in exchange for bargain basement animated clips and stunted gameplay. Bowser has kidnapped the Princess, again, and placed her in one of the seven hotels he threw together in the two seconds Mario wasn't looking. He writes a helpful note to Mario telling all this, and dares him to find her. What a lonely turtle-dragon-thing. The only solution is for Mario to go into each hotel and check each room for the princess, not advancing to the next floor until every door is closed. Enemies roam each level, looking to kill Mario or just annoy him by opening doors he's already closed.

Fundamentally it's not a horrible idea for a game, just not one you're really going to have much interest in for 100 levels. It's the type of thing you'd see nowadays on Popcap or some other Flash game site and play for five minutes. If you're really obsessed with knowing more about this game, there's a level by level review available elsewhere, and the venerable YouTube has the game's opening cutscene as well as gameplay videos.

Another CD-i Mario game called Super Mario's Wacky Worlds was in the planning stages in late 1992. It was meant to play in the same style as Super Mario World, but for various reasons you can read about at the link, it felt apart. Instead we got this. If you've ever actually used a CD-i controller, and can imagine trying to play a traditional platformer with it, I think you'll agree it was for the best.

Mario's Game Gallery - Presage, 1995

Published by Interplay, and re-released by Mindscape in 1997 under the name Mario's FUNdamentals. You can find another short promo video for it at the Internet Archive. Here's one to break out at your next cocktail party: What game was first to feature the official voice of Mario, Charles Martinet? If you said Mario 64, get the hell out of my house because the answer is Mario's Game Gallery. Okay, so Wikipedia wants to claim it was the Windows release of Mario Teaches Typing, also released in 1995, but Wikipedia is a kingdom of lies. It doesn't matter, the point is they finally decided on a man for the job and his first game is a cheap PC tie-in. It's like finding a replacement for Walt Disney to do Mickey Mouse and then making his first job recording an ad for Disney brand maxi pads. M-I-C... See? No unsightly leaks! K-E-Y... Why? Because of the patented dual barrier!

Charles Martinet has what I believe must be one of the worst jobs in the world. Go to his website and you'll be presented with a Quicktime video that acts as his demo reel. After being greeted with a small taste of what Lawnmower Man would've been like had it starred Jack Palance (an alternate future we would all do well to contemplate), it moves into a montage of clips from various instructional and promotional videos he's worked on. Elsewhere, there's another demo reel of his work as a live presenter at industry trade shows. Imagine having to go out in front of a group of industry folk, sometimes in character, and speak at length about Sun Microsystems or some other agonizingly dry material, in front of people who are going to know whether or not you actually know what you're talking about. It's like having to give book reports for the rest of your life.

And don't believe playing Mario grants him a brief respite from the pain. His very first job as the character was interacting with people at trade shows in 1994 via a real-time demo of Mario's head (which would later become the intro to Mario 64) that was mocapped to his face. Even today, he has to do stuff like this. Rumor has it five of the 12 crew members present during the filming of that segment have already died of shame.

The word "budget" pretty much define's Mario's Game Gallery. If there's any doubt, just look at the game's epic list of credits. It's a basic collection of the most common games known to man: Go Fish, checkers, dominoes, backgammon and yacht (aka Yahtzee). Your opponent in all these games is a rather talkative Mario. For your part, you're represented in the game by a child yelling down a hallway in Go Fish. Take that file and loop it a few dozen times, and you'll have successfully recreated the aural experience of playing Mario's Game Gallery.

Still, it's not a horrible game for what it is. The artwork is actually on-model, and the games play like they should. If you could find a kid that actually likes playing checkers and dominoes, they'd probably get something out of this. The only real negative is that there were lots of cheap card and board game collections on the shelves in 1995, and most were much more robust than this.

Aside from the couple of aforementioned re-releases, Game Gallery marked the end of the Nintendo licensing trend, as quietly as it had began. The "multimedia revolution" was finished, the N64 came out, and Nintendo had more important things to focus on. Mario's experiments in the PC world were over, save for a lifetime's worth of ROM hacks that turn his sprite in SMB3 into a penis. Thank God, at least we still have that.