An interesting 10-minute video from gruz about Super Mario Bros. Remastered, a modern Super Mario fan remake with surprising depth that puts Nintendo’s own efforts to shame:

What I liked about it is that it’s wrestling with the idea “How do you improve on something considered perfect?” and touches upon the important area we cover occasionally here on this blog: when is software finished?

There is also another interesting angle. Even though the game requires original game ROMs to work, it’s still in a very, very gray area:

[…] Once you strip it down, this thing is built around Nintendo’s world: the Super Mario Bros. name, the characters, the visual identity, the level concepts, the branding, the whole presentation. And the more ambitious it gets, the riskier it feels. Once a fan project starts offering not just a remake, but extra modes, editor tools, custom-level browsing, ratings, and a growing user-generated content scene, it stops looking like a small tribute and starts looking like something operating in Nintendo’s lane.

(I didn’t expect to see the original Super Mario game to come up so often on this blog – I just added a tag for it – especially since I don’t have any personal reverence for it. But it seems it’s Super Mario and Doom specifically that became timeless pieces of software that keep being resurrected, revisited, and remixed, over and over again.)