The Hidden Genius Behind Super Mario Bros. 

I’m so early I haven’t even gotten to the sponsor segment yet lol

no

imo this is the hardest one of the 3. world and 3 are easier by far.

*hi gu-*

omg ddp dan salvato

hi

I think for me it was for Death Stranding, the moment I understood on a deeper level how the walking and balancing mechanics work. It made traversing the world a blast, and contributed to the game becoming my favorite of all time.

A heart-pounding collab

He also did the MUSIC for that one horror visual novel!

JUST MARIO

@@lyrawhi LOVE doki doki panic club!

Doki Doki Literature Club is great! If you want a similar kind of experience, I also recommend checking out YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story.

THE GUY WHO WORKED ON UCF FOR MELEE????

au pire dit "dokidoki" pour panic , et "ddlc" pour litterature club

@@retrebex5856Could be a misstranslation but how is that worst?

Thats why is better to remember him for the P is for Pain level on the OG Mario Maker.

@@Monkeymario. "au pire" is a french expression, if I had to translate it, it would probably be by: "worst case scenario" as in "worst case scenario say 'dokidoki' for panic and 'ddlc' for litterature club", hope that helps

Are the two things related at all?

the sprite is indeed flipped when it shouldn't be

@@theengineer-dellconagher i guess the sprite was created from left to right as you would think and then not flipped? maybe

Definitely

Has to be. Even when I first played this game when I was about 7, I was like "why are Bowser's fireballs backwards?"

That's an interesting observation! I guess I've never really thought of them as fireballs. I think of them as like.. "flying fire breath," I think? It's like if Bowser was on the right side of the fire breathing it out of his mouth to toward the left, then they just take that sprite and scroll it across the screen. But thinking about them as fireballs, your idea totally makes sense.

This was pretty hilarious

It's a lot different to other companies. For example, there's one that uses people for making videos about emulators or making games loosely based on pokemon (but with guns).

It was also a lot more difficult to playtest your own game back then, given the difficulty of assembly, version control and general slowness of everything involved.

Back in the early 80s, putting this level of thought and play test on a game was something unheard of. Looking at the complexity of the code, to make everything works like it did, and still fit on the cart, clearly shows the developers treated SMB as their magnum opus ever since development. No wonder it completely changed the whole game industry at the time.

@@ThePharphis Prototyping was also slower and more expensive. If you wanted to play the game "properly" on a real Famicom, you needed to make a separate PROM for each version, or else use EPROMs, which could be erased by UV light. These were expensive by modern standards and took a bit of time to write and erase compared to EEPROMs. (Actually, Nintendo might have used early EEPROMs, but they still would have been slow to write and required a specialized high-voltage writer.) In modern game design, you can make a single tweak, then test it, then another tweak, etc., and try twenty different adjustments in the time it would take just to write one new EPROM. This is also why so many games included debug codes: so you could play on real hardware and quickly set up the state you're trying to test after power on. Usually those codes were removed before release, but sometimes one or more codes was forgotten or ignored and ended up in the final product.

😂😂 great comment. Now companies push out unfinished games and essentially have players play test and then update.

That’s a very good point actually. It seems so common today to look for secrets in anywhere we can but at the time those types of areas are places lots would never think to look.

Well, there's a reason he didn't call it P is for Pleasure

Yes, it's really sad to see when a game amounts to basically a list of deliverables and a deadline, without much care for the art of game design. The industry today might look very different than it did a few decades ago, but I do want to mention how much of an exception "good games" were back then. I think most games were just that-a publisher or licensor with a list of features they want in the game, and a ship date. It was still in most people's heads that games were toys, not art. Toys aren't built to last. Today, the failures are more noticeable because budgets are larger, but also because we have millions of passionate gamers who are all on social media to share the drama of overhyped games that fall flat. But I would argue that there are *far* more people today who care about the craft than what we had 30-40 years ago. The industry is full of developers and artists who want to recapture the experiences that impacted them so much in their youth. It's also easier than ever to make indie games, which is where a lot of the bigger risks are taken. I think the story of creators having their talent squandered by management is a tale as old as time-it's not a new problem, and I don't think it's strictly worse than it used to be.

play one indie game I beg you

@@life-destiny1196 I think most inde games are the ones carrying the artistry in the industry. Small teams and solo devs making awesome stuff is the reason why there's still plenty of great games to play while the publishers like Ubisoft give us slop like Star Wars Outlaws.

Well, I don't think it could've happened any other way really. The companies only seeking for profit are not going to risk making a failure by venturing into unknown territory. The companies making those innovations clearly have a team of people with an intrinsic motivation to push the limits of their profession which also means they will try to do their absolute best to present the capabilities of their new game in a way where the player really has the best experience they can give them.

@@dansalvato To add onto this, another pretty big factor is the survivorship bias inherent when discussing retro games. Like, for every Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, or Castlevania that did really well, broke new ground, and launched a series that lasted for decades, there were dozens of games nobody talks about anymore because they aren't even worth remembering. It's true there are some real gems on the NES and SNES that still hold up and are worth playing today, but boy are there some stinkers, too. And that's _with_ the industry being a fraction of the size that it is today. So it's really easy to talk about how iconic a launch title was, but that's because you don't think about the launch titles that _weren't._

Hey to be fair, knowing how and when to _subvert_ that for maximum impact is also a part of game design.

@@FlameUser64 Yep, that I agree with and know first hand, I love DDLC, I just found that quote VERY ironically funny with the context that's all

I feel they described this well and pointed out Jump King as an example. Castlevania is a great game designed around those jump mechanics so it works. But a game designed solely around running and jumping is more fun with a bit more control for most people and this game did well revolutionary tweaking physics for a fun yet challenging experience. (Even though feels outdated and difficult to control today)

@@mikeallison5549 I suppose that's true in many cases.

You do know Dan is also known for being a legend in the Kaizo Mario community, right?

@@yeshevishman i'm aware, that's why i'm commenting this

@@juxx9628 If he's also known for Mario stuff, then I don't think it's so crazy for him to appear here

YES. This is also, imo, what made the earlier star wars movies better. Tech limitations forced creativity / lateral thinking.

forcément , si on prends les triples A d'une entreprise connu random , mais si on prends des jeux pas connu (et y'en a plein qui méritent d'être découvert!) y'a pas ce genre de probleme! et au pire , joues a des triples A qui ont 2/3 ans , ça fait pas mal (si c'était un bon triple A , ça le resteras)

Many indie games are still brilliant; and usually cheaper! Try to find and support those instead if you don't like what blockbuster games are doing. :)

@@peterpeladon Oh absolutely, I've been playing indies for quite some time, more often than not they're far better than AAA games. But I was specifically refering to the part that they *had* to be super creative with how they made games back then because of tech limitations. Nowadays a game can be say super unoptimized and still be fine without having to think of any sophistry to make do

@@AnHebrewChild And when the limitations were removed for the exact same movies, most people consider those to be the inferior version.

Could you share some examples? Someone shared Flicky which I definitely agree with based on footage I looked up, but others I've seen are indeed quite stiff

@@Kosmicd12 Flicky was the first one that came to my mind too, and tbh, the one or two others I had in mind were more like platform/shooter hybrids of sorts than straight-up "run and jump" platformers.

I keep noticing Bomberman Hero music EVERYWHERE. Did Nintendo randomly make it free use or something?

@@flashraylaser157 I'd like to hope people just remembered how great it was. Really got me into that style of music as a kid. Kosmic always has a great music selection on these videos

​@@flashraylaser157 that would be KONAMI's call, since tragically, they now hold the rights for Bomberman.

@@stevenschiro1838 I would hope so too, and I'm sure Kosmic genuinely appreciates it, but I've genuinely heard it so much recently that it feels like a one in a million that this is coincidence. The other comment says Konami owns the rights and I also believe this is correct which only adds to my confusion. So you know the "Summoning Salt music"? There are a lot of Rubik's cube speedsolving channels that typically use "We're Finally Landing" and a lot of the music Summoning Salt does. Between those and a few smaller speedrunning channels, this makes probably the 8th time I've suddenly heard Bomberman Hero (specifically) in the last two months after a lifetime of not hearing the music outside of playing the game. Something seriously has to be up.

Tbf almost everyone nowdays has a pc and a console that can handle such games with such large space it's not like an entire 200 gigs are going to be stored in your pcs ram But yeah that doesn't justify the absurdly massive storage space of useless sht and uncompressed files

😂

time is a philosophical invention of man

I for one welcome our new algorithm overlords

well it was posted to youtube, and your past interactions with this channel led the app to think it was a good fit for you, so it sent you an automated recommendation

​@@wesshiflet2214 you're correct. except for the small detail that the app does not "think" it was a good fit, the app just gets from the youtube servers a list of videos to display, the server has the algorithm 🤓☝️

​@@PhildoBaggins😂 thank you

Romhack Wednesday fan gets recognition

😳

Joust is not controlling your jumps... it's not jumping at all. If you want to point to a game that joust influenced, that's gonna be Balloon Fight! Did the Mario Bros. devs make comments about Joust influencing them or something? I hadn't seen Flicky before! The mechanics in it looks very surprisingly smooth. I was ready to go to bat and say yeah sure you can control your jumps but i bet it's really unrefined with hard turnarounds and unrefined movement. But it looks really nice. Thanks for sharing!

@@Kosmicd12 Flicky controls extremely smoothly. It's designed with proper momentum, steering, collision, etc. You should definitely try it, if you can. As for Joust inspiring Mario Arcade, I'll admit that it's conjecture, but there's /probably/ some truth to it, if you consider the layouts, gameplay, and widespread nature of clones in the 1980s. Again, loved the vid and SMB1.

He turns into a different enemy in every world, except world 8 where he's really bowser

@@Kosmicd12 Ok, so I'm not crazy for thinking I've seen him flip upside down before. This game has so many interesting little code optimizations.

​@@StormBurnX it's not an optimisation (p sure), its that canonically you dont meet the real bowser until the end

​@Kosmicd12 Wait, you're telling me that BOWSER is actually in a different castle too?! Haha That's incredible. I never noticed before now.

Let's go! I love to hear about people making new games for retro systems. Best of luck on your project, it's a really rewarding endeavor.

@@dansalvato Thank you!

Well, he also made the game itself.

Wait a few weeks

@@Kosmicd12 24hrs later: *youtube notif saying kosmic did a video on a crazy insane **4:50*

It's just a limitation of SMBs sprite manipulation logic because there was just so little RAM that you could only deal with like 8 independently moving entities at once. Just storing their screen coordinates, speeds, and states took up a significant fraction of that 2048 bytes (yes, 2k)

Coyote time is mentioned at 3:51. That's not why you can run across 1 block gaps, that's not what coyote time is. Coyote time means you can jump even after you leave the ground. You can't do that in any Mario game I know of except Mario Wonder with the Jet Run Badge. If you push jump while you're over the 1 block gaps you won't jump.

I don’t think it’s exactly like that. One person just asks questions that usually viewers will have.

@@pokechu08 yes i get the intent of it, but "faking" not knowing themselves to ask those questions or set them up, just makes the whole thing feel cringe to me. not a fan. love the video very informative, i just dont like when its a dialogue like this unless its unscripted and the questions asked are genuine ones the people hold or theyre addressed like "some people might ask why x is like y" and then they explain it, instead of pretending cosmic or dan doesnt understand something it feels like both of them plenty understood going into this.

It make me think of the memes AI Taylor Swift explains algebra

Nah it's great exposition, it's like a classical dialogue.

I like it

As a matter of note, that is PRECISELY why my series of books contain multiple layers of subtle nuances, which--when considered "as a collective whole"--do not simply build a "world"... they describe a UNIVERSE. ;) #LegendaryStorytelling Not that anyone will recognize it until ~30-60 years from now. Possible 120+, come to think of it. If at all.