Super Mario Bros remakes remain a favourite for new devs looking to hone their skills. We've seen everything from a reimagining of Super Mario World in 3D in Unreal Engine 5 to an intentionally "awful" blocky Mario, and even a cheeky look at what an EA Mario might look like.
Now someone's taken up the challenge of recreating most of the first level of Nintendo's classic Super Mario Bros as an exercise to learn the rope of the free open-source program Godot Engine (see our guide to the best game development software). If you want a dose of nostalgia, the dev's put his work online so you can try it out for yourself.
My pretty close (but incomplete) recreation of Super Mario Bros. 1-1 in Godotfrom r/godot
As posted on Reddit, devellopsomedonkus69 has been learning Godot through the 20 Games Challenge, a self-paced learning framework that involves building a series of 20 classic video games of increasing complexity. And they went all out for the Mario stage of the challenge.
"I really love Mario games, so when I got to that part of the challenge I decided to go all out and recreate SMB 1-1 as faithfully as I could," the budding developer writes.
That involved recreating everything from scratch except the audio, including copying the art pixel by pixel. The developer says they learned a lot and also gained a new appreciation of how much work went in to making such classic games
While they didn't clock how many hours they put into the project, the developer says they worked on 45 days between late March and early this month. While they recommend the experience, they also suggest it's important for beginners to have fun and perhaps not get quite so bogged in trying to make it perfect.
"I took a lot of breaks and I started to get burned out by the end, so I cut some scope (namely the fire flower and star power) so I could call it complete," they write. "I definitely didn't need to go this in-depth to learn game development, and maybe I shouldn't have, but right now I'm glad I did. It gave me a lot of confidence and a better understanding of how to break down a game into small problems that can more easily be solved."
You can play the game on Itch.io.
For more nostalgic gaming, see our picks of the best retro gaming consoles and the best retro gaming handhelds.
