Perfect Little Jumps – Super Mario Bros 1-1 and Basho's Frog
Before the most famous video game character went by the name of Mario, he was known in Japan as Jumpman. This would have been just after his first appearance as the hero and protagonist of Donkey Kong, the arcade platformer. You're probably well enough acquainted with the game, the little sprite has to make his way up a series of sloping platforms and ladders while avoiding the barrels being thrown down by the angry ape of the game's title. Nintendo then decided to give him his own outing for the Famicon home console and, once the game was localised for the American release of Super Mario Bros, he was named after Mario Segale, the landlord of the building that housed Nintendo's US headquarters. With that came all the subsequent decades of woo-hoo, it's a me, karting, tanuki cosplay and some very occasional plumbing. But there is something about that original name, Jumpman. Because there really is the possibility that the whole entertainment empire that has spawned blockbuster movies and theme parks all comes down to that perfect little jump.
I don't think I've ever completed Super Mario Bros. It's more of a comfort game for me, something I start playing for a few minutes before fielding requests from my junior domestic overlords. I do the same with the opening Green Hill Zone level of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game.
If you were a gamer during the 80s and 90s you will not doubt remember that there was no save point. When you ran out of lives or quit, you had to go back to the very beginning. So developers designed levels with the knowledge that the player would be spending a lot of time ploughing through them in their latest attempt at getting further in the game.
That first level is often a statement of intent, a solid base on which the promise of the later game is built. In Super Mario Bros 1-1, Mario runs across a number of platforms and pyramids to a finish line. Along the way he encounters little mushroom-like enemies called Goombas and tortoise-like enemies called Koopa Troopers. Shigeru Myamoto, the game's legendary designer, said that Super Mario Bros 1-1 was a tutorial of sorts, teaching the player the basic skills they needed to play the rest of the game. For me, it's everything about the game distilled to its most vital form and at the very heart of that experience is Mario's (or Jumpman's) jump.
The player presses the A button and Mario leaps into the air. The perfect thing about this little jump is how quickly the player is able to ascertain its height and distance, how it will assist them in guiding Mario onto the higher platforms or gain power ups by smashing his little head into the underside of a question block. If the jump doesn’t work, nothing else works. The player won’t feel the inclination to meet the challenge of the later levels or keep going when failure dumps them back to square one. The movie adaptations, theme parks and Saturday Night Live pastiche’s won’t come into being if the button push and the resulting jump don’t feel just right.
We in the West love Japanese culture on many levels. For some of us it’s the excess that can only be found in anime, manga and the Yakuza video game series. For others its those Zen principles that, like Mario 1-1, pare things down to their most vital element. There’s no literary art form that achieves this more than the haiku. I’m not speaking of those aphoristic, seventeen syllable aberrations that most Westerners take to be haiku. I mean the traditional haiku form that places two distinct images right up close to each other to focus on that meeting place between the transient states of human nature and the vastness of nature itself.
I was a young man when I first read Basho’s old pond/frog jump/splash poem, I think it was via a book of translations of the poem by various leading lights of the literary world. It probably caught my eye at the time because Allen Ginsberg's name was on the front cover. My knowledge of haiku back then was strictly conditioned by the aforementioned Western tradition of syllabic aphorisms. I flicked through (the book also doubled as a flick book with an animated image of the frog diving into the pond) and found myself beset by that “is that it?” feeling that often I looked down on when I saw it expressed by others at abstract art exhibitions. I then counted the syllables of the first few and double checked the back cover to make sure they really were haiku. Needless to say, I placed that book back on the shelf instead of taking it to the till. But, unbeknownst to me on a conscious level, the frog jumped out of the book and into my mind, into its murkiest depths, before I walked out of the door and and it kept popping back up in the decades to come.
There are a couple of stories behind the inception of the poem. The most popular version has Basho conversing with a zen master who encourages him to fully open himself up to what is happening right now, and in that very moment the splashing sound of a frog leaping into a pond outside led to Basho becoming enlightened. This story is most likely to be apocryphal, and the true origin is meant to be, according to Hiroaki Sato in his book On Haiku, a gesture of humility from Basho at the start of a renga session at his own home. Self conscious of the sparseness of his lodgings, Basho’s invocation of the frog's splash is offered in place of an item within his home that was compelling enough to be the first link of a renga.
That being said, the meaning of a haiku, in my opinion, is not necessarily dictated by the poet who wrote it, nor the master that accepted its inclusion if it was coined as a link during a renga session. Whether intended or not, I’ve often taken Basho’s frog to be a haiku that makes a statement about haiku itself. The poem is small and unremarkable like a little frog, but as it jumps into the pond and makes contact with the water’s surface, it becomes so much more than itself. The frog could be a thought or sensation, something that passes momentarily through the depths of the mind. Ripples widen and cascade across its surface. Like the perfect little jump in Mario Bros 1-1, it is graceful, satisfying, simultaneously self contained and so much more than itself.
The full file size of Super Mario Bros is 32 kilobytes, about the same size of a small Word document. The original mario sprite is 13 by 16 pixels. In these limited dimensions the artist was able to convey an Italian man in red overalls with a red cap and a moustache. Koji Kondo’s original chip tune soundtrack, another element of the game that has become a central tenet of all the culture that has sprung up from it, was handled via 4 tracks of sound on the NES/Famicon’s Ricoh 2A03 sound chip.
It’s so important to note that everything about Super Mario Bros 1-1 was a foundation for all the other Mario games to come, yet not a single element of it was cast aside. There aren't many multi-decade cultural franchises of which the same can be said. It is not just the beginning of a cultural phenomenon, it is still that phenomenon’s purest essence.
One thing I've always loved about a lot of poetry is how you can exercise a kind of ownership of a poem. If you want Monet's water lilies you'll have to make do with a printed copy, some other derivative or splash out a hundred million quid. But if a poem is short enough, you can make a copy of it in a notebook or carry it around in your head and the poem that you carry is not a derivative, it is the poem. While you probably can't carry the 32 kilobytes worth of code for Mario Bros in your head, the game can still be experienced in a lot of ways, some legit and some shady, and it is still, in many ways, the definitive version.
Perhaps one reason why artists of all media gravitate towards the convoluted, the baroque and the complex is because these elaborate, laboured constructions are harder to copy and therefore maintain their bonds to the act of authorship? Perhaps this is why the haiku form itself, with its roots in the collaborative practice of the renga, lives in the fuzzy boundary between authorship and collective endeavour?
Similar perhaps, to the collective labour of coders, graphic artists, composers and directors to realise a singular vision – a perfect little level full of perfect little jumps that allow the mass of neuroses and narratives that make up the mental life of the player to be forgotten.
Thanks for reading this.
I promised something a bit more joyful than last week's mid-career lament and I hope that this delivered. The idea for this essay has been bouncing about in my head for a couple of months and I'm happy that it found its way out. It's also quite a pleasant surprise that it's a fair bit shorter than I initially thought it might be as well, which helps to underline the point that the essay is making.
It's also very serendipitous that the relevant pixel art is already in existence, that being the frog outfit from Super Mario Bros 3. "Easy peasy" I thought, thinking I had once again got out of an hour of making my own image. I instead spent about as long making a frog Mario level in Super Mario Maker 2 and the rigmarole of exporting a captured image from a Switch to an iPad.
I'm also making peace with the idea that an essay doesn't have to draw some grand, summarising conclusion when examining a certain idea. How, like a haiku or a level of a video game, an essay can be self contained yet fragmentary, a momentary glimpse at the life of the mind.
These days, I don't think of myself as a particularly interesting person but I spend a lot of time thinking and it's some of those thoughts that I feel are worth being shared. I think that's the ethos that I'll keep writing under for now, it seems to be helpful in getting more essays out into the world at a faster rate.
As always, if you enjoyed this and want to give back you can subscribe for free and if you want to give back a bit more you can upgrade that sub to a paid one, choosing your own monthly amount. If that's not possible (and I know times are tough) you can share it via your social platforms or whisper about it into your favourite eardrums.
Niall