Mari0 is a 2012 side-scrolling platform video game developed by German indie developer Maurice Guégan and released onto his website Stabyourself.net. It combines gameplay elements from Nintendo's Super Mario series and Valve's Portal series. The game features Mario armed with a "Portal Gun", the main game mechanic in the Portal series, allowing him to create two inter-spatial portals on 2-dimensional surfaces, which can transport himself, enemies and other objects through them. It ran on the LÖVE framework. Beginning development in 2011, it was intended to be a direct port of the original Super Mario Bros. with the 4-player multiplayer system used in New Super Mario Bros. Wii - after Guégan viewed a Dorkly video titled Mario With A Portal Gun, the game was modified to include elements from the Portal series. The game quickly gained traction through online blogs and news sites, and has been downloaded nearly 1.6 million times. It was well-received by critics for its creativity and simplistic concept. A sequel, Mari0: Special Edition, was planned for release at an unknown date, however was soon cancelled in 2015 following technical constraints.
Gameplay
The core game of Mari0 plays directly from the 8-bit Super Mario Bros.2D platform game, where the player controls Mario via the keyboard, running and jumping through levels, avoiding or jumping on enemies to defeat them, while collecting coins to earn points towards their score. The game adds the concept of the "portal gun" from the Portal series; the player can click with the mouse device on two separate surfaces on the level to create a portal between them. This can be used for a number of gameplay options, often using vertical momentum entering one portal to "fling" the Mario character horizontally out of the other portal, but will also affect enemies and other game elements in similar manners. The core game uses the level designs from the original Super Mario Bros. as well as sets of test chambers inspired by Portals Aperture Science. A level editor, along with different graphic sets and shaders, are provided to create new content. Up to four players can cooperatively play in the game. On August 12, 2015, development on Mari0: Special Edition, a large update to Mari0, was cancelled. However, the beta versions of this update can be found on the website's forums.
Development
The original idea for Mari0 was to make a clone of Super Mario Bros. but with the multiplayer element that New Super Mario Bros. Wii had. However, after seeing a video on the humor site Dorkly entitled Mario With A Portal Gun, Maurice decided he would add a portal gun as well. Development began in January 2011 by Maurice Guégan, the lead programmer of Stabyourself.net. He frequently created blog posts keeping followers up to date with the latest Mari0 developments, including a month-long screenshot marathon of Mari0 updates. Several teasers and videos were posted and a speculated release date of Christmas 2011 was proposed, although this was later pushed towards New Year's Eve 2011, and then postponed further until beta testing had been completed and Maurice was satisfied with the release. The final release date was posted as a puzzle and was quickly decoded to reveal March 3, 2012 as the release date. An accompanying count-down timer was also placed on the Stabyourself.net homepage. The first official release was made alongside the publishing of a trailer video. Several updates were released shortly after the game's launch to add a few new features, extra sets of levels, and fix many bugs. The code was also uploaded to a public GitHub repository with recent changes featuring a few minor bug fixes and updates to newer versions of LÖVE. On May 1, 2012, Mari0: Special Edition was announced. It was an update to the game which was planned to feature the originally delayed online multiplayer, along with several other features for use in custom levels, such as vertical maps, custom characters, and more elements from Portal 2. Development continued on for several years and a few beta versions were released to the forums. However, after over a year of silence about the update, it was confirmed as being cancelled on August 12, 2015.
Reception
Mari0 has been covered on various technology and video game websites. It has gained a lot of attention on sites such as YouTube and Reddit. The game has been well received on various video game blog sites. John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun stated "If it doesn't make you gasp and want topost it to the rest of the internet, then I simply don't understand you." One year after the release, the game had accumulated 1.6 million downloads from the website according to the developers.
