By 
Today, anyone having trouble with a video game can just log onto the internet and find countless walkthroughs, guides, and tutorials. But back when Super Mario Bros. first arrived on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, we mostly had to get advice from other kids at school. Unsurprisingly, the playground approach led to an endless mix of truth and legend, where the sequence of the Konami code blended with tall tales about uncles who worked at Nintendo.
But Chris Pratt, who voices Mario in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, assures Den of Geek that one of the most famous playground tales is true. “There was a glitch, and it was confirmed to me the other night as I sat across from Miyamoto-san at dinner,” Pratt reveals, recalling his conversation with game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. “That was a glitch that they did not pick up in level three, where you could jump on a turtle when you’re at the edge of a screen and get a million free lives.”
For the youngsters who don’t know what Pratt’s talking about: in World 3 Level 1 of Super Mario Bros. you can use Mario to kick a green Koopa shell against a staircase. If you time it right, you can make Mario jump on the shell as it ricochets back, which will send Mario back up into the air to land on the shell again and kick it back toward the staircase.
The act creates an infinite loop, with Mario landing on the shell to kick the shell to stop it and kick it back to the staircase. Each time Mario jumps on the shell, the player receives points. Eventually, those points turn into 1-Ups, allowing the player to accumulate infinite lives.
Apparently, Mario designer Miyamoto did not intend for that to happen, but liked to reward players who figured it out, says Pratt’s co-star Charlie Day, a.k.a. Luigi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. “Miyamoto said that there’s some glitches that they would discover and decide to leave in the game as fun things for people to find,” Day explains. “There were one or two that got past them, and that was one.”
Nice as it is to have the rumor confirmed by the man who gave us Mario, Pratt has fond memories of forming friendships over the NES. “I first played Super Mario Bros. probably in ’89, when I got my first Nintendo. I had played the arcade version of Mario, but also my neighbor Ron Wurst had a Nintendo.
“I was like, ‘That’s the game from the laundromat!’ and we played it, and that was the first time that you controlled it with left and right and up and down buttons instead of a joystick. I was like, ‘Wow, this will never take off.’
“Cut to a maybe a year or so later, my mom somehow tracked down a Nintendo from a pawn shop, meaning we were playing on a stolen Nintendo,” Pratt continues. “It was unreal, because it was the nicest gift we’ve ever gotten.”
“I probably first played it when it came out in 1986,” recalls Day. “My sister and I got a Nintendo, a lot of kids in my neighborhood was getting it, everyone was getting it. Everyone was playing it.
“The thing really coming back to me is finding the hidden levels, knowing that you could get to the top [of underground stages] and run along the bricks at the top of the level. There was no internet, so it was all word-of-mouth. One of our friends had to discover that and tell everybody at school.”
As the people who bring Mario and Luigi to life on the big screen, Pratt and Day no longer have to rely on such primitive techniques. They can get the answers from Miyamoto himself. But there’s still something magical about those early, innocent days of a pre-Internet childhood, a feeling of magic that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hopes to recreate for a new generation.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is in theaters now.
The post Chris Pratt Got Confirmation About a Long-Rumored Super Mario Glitch appeared first on Den of Geek.
