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Super Mario Land
The first portable Mario still has a few surprises left.
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PRESS START
An Introduction To Today’s Game
With over 200 Mario games, and closer to 300 if you count remakes and remasters, here is one I had never played.
There is something charmingly scrappy about Super Mario Land. It takes the familiar Mario formula, shrinks it onto the Game Boy, then immediately sends the plumber somewhere much stranger than the Mushroom Kingdom, with pyramids, submarines, an airplane, and an alien villain all crammed into one tiny cartridge.
For a game tied so closely to Nintendo’s first great handheld era, it still has the energy of a studio trying ideas just because they sounded fun.
That odd personality is what has kept the game around. Super Mario Land was Mario’s first real portable platformer, it introduced Daisy, and it gave the Game Boy an early adventure that felt distinct from the NES games even when the screen was doing it no favors.
It is short, a little unusual, and far from the most polished Mario ever made, but it remains one of the easiest cartridges to describe as small, strange, and memorable in the same breath.
BEHIND THE PIXELS
Let’s Dive Into The Game
It’s Mario, so you know what to expect.
You still run right, jump on enemies, grab coins, and navigate to the end of the stage… your typical 2D Mario stuff. But every so often the game stops pretending to be a standard Mario adventure and hands you a submarine or a plane to make it feel fresh.
The goal is simple, travel across Sarasaland’s four kingdoms and rescue Daisy from Tatanga.
Mechanically, the game is familiar enough to pick up fast, but different enough that longtime Mario players usually notice the changes right away.
The vehicle stages, boss encounters and scrolling shooter sections give the game a different rhythm from the more grounded console entries around it. That variety helps a lot, because the adventure is compact and depends on quick shifts in scenery and gimmicks to stay fresh.
The presentation is a mix of clever adaptation and early handheld compromise.
The worlds are memorable because they do not feel like a miniature Mushroom Kingdom, they feel like their own odd postcard set, and the soundtrack has enough personality that people still single it out decades later.
At the same time, even sympathetic revisits tend to admit that the sprites can look tiny and the audio is not always as strong or as clean as later Game Boy standouts.
That tension is really the key to understanding the game now. A lot of modern players still enjoy it, especially in short bursts, but they also point to the unusual jump feel and the fact that it can end just as it seems to be warming up.
Viewed in that light, Super Mario Land is less an overlooked masterpiece and more a fascinating early portable experiment that absolutely works, even if it does not move with the same confidence as Mario’s best known side scrollers.
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GAME INFORMATION
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WHERE TO PLAY
Nintendo Classics - GameBoy App.
Original Copies of the Game (All prices in USD)
Loose: $18
Complete: $105
New/Sealed: $650
COVER ART
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GAME OVER
Why You Should Play This
Nintendo’s current Switch Online release is probably the best entry point because suspend points and rewind make the old pick up and replay structure far easier to enjoy than it was on original hardware. It also helps that the game’s short length now feels more like a selling point than a limitation.
The trick is to meet it where it is. This is not the deepest Mario, the smoothest Mario, or the one with the richest set of levels, but it is one of the most distinctive, and that still counts for a lot.
Some classics ask you for a whole weekend, Super Mario Land asks for a small pocket of time and rewards it with a brisk little adventure that still feels unlike anything else in the series.
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RETRO HARDWARE
Miyoo Flip V2 Retro Handheld Game Console
The Miyoo Flip V2 is a tiny clamshell retro handheld that lets you carry a whole library of classic games in your pocket. With a bright screen, solid controls, and the nostalgic flip design we all remember, it’s perfect for quick gaming sessions anywhere. Click the picture to check it out. My readers can use the following code for a 12% discount: NY12
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