A laptop with an RTX 3050 is running Super Mario Bros. Wonder as a Windows program, and a clip from a developer called Belmante is the clearest look yet at how far that work has come. World 1-1 plays at close to 60 frames a second. Menus, character select, the opening cutscene, and the world map all line up with an earlier Mac build of the same project. Sound comes through the game’s own audio path, routed on Windows through XAudio2.
Kosmic spent another long session mapping leftover oddities in Versus Super Mario Bros., the 1986 arcade cabinet that copies most of the original NES game while changing a few rules, timers, and memory habits. Growing a vine in the wrong place after a death still queues an extra plant for the next screen. Near the top of any vine Mario loses control and auto-climbs; that state leaves a flag set so the next transition (death works best) sprouts a second vine wherever the surviving player happens to stand.
Super Buzzy Yoshi released Super Mario World Remastered for PC this week as a custom campaign inside Super Mario Bros. X2. You install SMBX2 Beta 5 Patch 4 first, drop the project folder into the worlds directory, then pick the campaign from the list on the left side of the screen. The entire adventure runs through the fan engine, thus no standalone executable or ROM file is required.
Photo credit: inb4ohnoes
Sophia Tung spent a year turning Nintendo’s orange boombox-on-wheels into a street-legal machine she could actually ride. The YouTuber and engineer, already known for deep dives into robotaxis and emerging tech, became so hooked on Mario Kart World that she decided the Tune Thumper had to exist in real life at full size. Everything on it works: speakers play music, buttons click and pause tracks, headlights and taillights fire up, the antenna stands tall, and a Nintendo Switch 2 dock sits inside the cassette-door section so you can play the game on the very bike it came from.
Brazilian speedrunner LeKukie finished Super Mario Bros. in 4 minutes, 54 seconds, and 365 milliseconds on June 2. That time sits exactly one tenth of a second, or six frames, short of the best possible human run under the rules speedrunners follow. Former record holder Kosmic laid out the details in a recent video, and the community now treats the perfect completion as an approaching fact rather than a distant dream.
Tobi Friedly has delivered exactly what many fans hoped for but never expected to see on original hardware. The full Super Mario 64 experience now runs on the classic Nintendo DS, and it includes proper local co-op for two players who each bring their own handheld.
Bidders drove one exceptional sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. to a final price of $3 million during Heritage Auctions’ Video Games Signature event on June 12. The result cleared the previous high mark by a full million dollars and established a new record for any video game sold at public auction. Heritage presented the cartridge as lot 28025 in its June 12–13 sale. Professional graders at PSA assigned it a 9.6 A++ rating, the strongest score this particular variant has received. The copy carries Nintendo’s gloss sticker seal, a detail that places it in the second production run from early 1986.
Carl Llewellyn spends his days playing with tiny computers and classic gaming cartridges. Recently, he went far beyond what most people would dare to do, connecting a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation 2 to play Super Mario 64 on the internet simultaneously. Players take control of their own Mario and progress through stages in real time.
SEGA’s Dreamcast may have met an early demise, but the console’s legacy lives on among fans. Now, a small crew has ported Super Mario 64 to the console. That’s right, programmer jnmartin84 finished what mrneo240 started in 2020, resulting in a game based on the original and burned onto a CD-R for crisper visuals as well as richer sound.
