The Eventual Death of the Super Mario Brothers

When I look for things that I find beautiful, it seems that I find myself looking for things that are dying. Things that are decaying, going wrong, falling apart, disused, unwanted, rotting; some man-made thing that starts out perfectly machined and ends up falling apart in some way. I can't walk past a single building without thinking to myself "man, that would be awesome to walk around in if it was half-broken down and covered in moss and vines" (my internal monologue generally doesn't use a very extensive vocabulary). There is aesthetic fulfillment in the simple act of walking and exploration, in experience, not just in looking or listening to something (though they are part of that experience).

Bringing this love for decay back to a larger perspective, it's something I look for in, well, everything. I'm a long time fan of electronic music. While by nature it's sort of cold and impersonal, I find it infinitely more appealing once it begins to straddle that machine/organic dichotomy this writing is about. I wouldn't find Boards of Canada compelling without that hint of tape fuzz, those slightly out-of-tune synths. Nobukazu Takemura's work would be completely sterile if it weren't for the skipping CD's he uses extensively. Tim Hecker and Fennesz would be lost without distortion and feedback. I feel everything I listen to has to be messed with, changed up in an unpredictable and organic way in order to make it compelling on a human level.

With all that in mind, I will start the entry content proper proper with this declaration: I have been doing some things with Super Mario Brothers. Hacking them, as it were. But it's not so much an activity with intentions and objectives so much as it is a psychogeographical map of a video game. psycholudogical, maybe, though I try to stay away from coining phrases that nobody needs.



The process reads like this: Download the rom from someplace(it's illegal, so don't do it if that sort of thing upsets your stomach and ruins your day), open it up in your text editor or hex editor of choice, move and change things around(keeping exactly the same file size), save your changes, then open up the rom in your emulator of choice (I use Nestopia for Mac OS X), see what happens, repeat. 99% of the time the answer is "not much" or "nothing" or "this is frustrating, I can't start a game or move my character at all." But take heart! For the 1% of hacks that display some sort of difference from the original while remaining playable, it's very much worth it.

The resulting images and experiences one gets from hacking Super Mario Brothers in such a fashion are glorious. Colors shift at will, Mario walks through walls, music changes when you stomp on an enemy, the background turns into walls and walls of text. When you insert glitches into the game, you decay it in some fashion. Artist Cory Arcangel and the Paperrad collective made an excellent little movie (open it up with an emulator and don't press anything) about this.

Most of our digital media is dying faster than we can preserve it. CD's become unusable over time, storage formats become obsolete and discarded, leaving people with no way to save their information. Tapes die, hard disks crash, sometimes a power surge happens and bits simply get shifted. Design firm Experimental Jetset has been creating an archive of lost formats, and simply to see the number of storage mediums that we no longer can use, whose reading devices are decaying and being irreparably broken faster than they are. We lose our culture, byte by byte, with every single floppy disk that gets exposed to just a little bit too much air. Nearly nothing is left of things I've made from the ages of 10 to 14—no writing, no hypercard stacks, no games, no game hacks, no game saves, no art, no sound files, no recordings of my friend and I goofing around with the microphone, no claymation movie made with a webcam and too much free time.

And yet, isn't there something appealing about all this? The futurist (both modern armchair- and 1914- types) buried deep within me takes joy in the thought of having a world with no past (extremely doubtful that it is, that the world will lose all its information due to obsolete formats), a world where the library burns itself down, bit by bit. It is silly, though. It's a problem that's been acknowledged and is being addressed by projects on the internet (through the MAME project, for example, or TextFiles), and the forces of society at large (anyone who fights against Digital Rights Management software fights for cultural preservation). So I feel safe saying that modern history will be able to last a little longer. But for now, enjoy the aesthetic its decay has created, and glitch away!

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I've set up a directory containing the best of my glitched roms and their sounds so far at sawtooth.ptoing.net/misc/nes/
Feel free to look around! Post your own in the comments section if you feel so inclined!

Sun, Apr 29, 2007  Permanent link