Super Mario Bros 3: World 2-Quick Sand
There’s a level in Super Mario Bros 3 that’s terrifying, and not just because it challenges literally every natural law that governs reality. Years after playing the game Super Mario All Stars on my parents' Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), I can still recall the panic I experienced playing this level. I feel comfortable admitting this, I really haven’t experienced a comparable “scare” by a video-game until I played Resident Evil 7 and one of the molded poked its head out from around the corner. What game could possibly compare to arguably one of the most terrifying gaming experiences in the last ten years?
The answer is of course Super Mario Bros 3.
Super Mario Bros 3 was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) in North America on 12 February 1990(almost one exact year after I was born fyi). After recently finishing Alyse Knorr’s book about the game I decided to try and tackle it again on my Nintendo Switch and see if I could finally beat it. I had made it as far as world 3-4 when I was a kid, surely now I would be able to get past that.
I’m currently on world 3-8 and Boss Bass keeps eating me.
Rotten bastard.
Super Mario Bros 3 was distinct from its predecessors in the Mario Bros series for a number of reasons. There was more music, more enemies, distinct worlds, and overworld map that allowed players the chance to “explore” regions as they moved from level to level rather than shift to them via fade-to-black sequences. Now Mario, and Luigi, could traverse regions that were decorated with dancing trees, lakes and rivers, pyramids, mountains, and even castles. Each of the levels within these worlds were represented by a small dark square which was decorated with a star and a number.
Most of them did anyway.
Cover for North American release provided by The Cover Project
After beating world 2-3 and the fortress, the players will observe a square which has no numbers, and it’s decorated by what appears to be a kind of vortex of quicksand. When I was a kid this visual left me curious and hesitant to progress, but I wanted to keep playing the game so I entered the course.
What followed was a delightful early experience with hell.
The level opens up like most of the levels in this world do: Mario stands on a flat plane of sand and an empty blue sky. However, unlike the other levels up to this point, the sky was now decorated with a sun that had a face. This isn’t that unusual to the game, one of the designers Takashi Tezuka responsible for art direction had wanted to put more details in the first game, and thanks to the processing power of the NES he could. The end result was that various shrubs and clouds in the background of the game now had eyes giving them a living personality rather than empty decoration.
This sun wasn’t just a decoration however.
This sun was angry. It glared at me from on high, and was baring its teeth.
“Whatever” my young mind thought, “the clouds have eyes in this world, why not the sun?” Fool that I was. My brain fashioned the thought that this heavenly body, murder on its mind, reminded me of the suns at Panchos that smiled at me while I ate my enchiladas. So I ignored it and kept going. I walked and encountered quick sand pits that were frustrating but I worked through them. I encountered a tornado that swept me back and forced me to refine my skills, achieving the “P” level allowing me to jump over it. There were a few koopas that were easily dispatched. Things were going well for me and I predicted an easy win.
And then the goddamn sun started falling out of the sky to attack me.
It bobbed back and forth above me like a cobra ready to strike. When it was ready, it swooped down in an arc, right into my path. Had I the language at the time to say, “Dude what the fuck?!” I would have. Earnestly.
I started the level again, ready and hopeful to beat this new enemy unlike anything in the game to this point, and again the sun’s trajectory was hawk-like.
The Sun killed me over and over again.
And I eventually stopped playing to go read some comics.
Living in Texas, and as of this writing surviving a summer with temperatures reaching 108 degrees with a real feel of 115 (fuck you humidity), the idea that the sun wants to kill me isn’t so much of a fanciful notion anymore. This essay won’t become an environmental PSA about climate change, rather it’s an opportunity to observe how well designed the Quick Sand level is structured.
When playing most Super Mario games, obstacles are typically shaped by how difficult I have to navigate Mario’s body around the space of the levels. This is partly because Mario “shifts.” Unlike other video game protagonists Mario’s movements, even while walking, can build a kind of momentum and it’s easy to forget that even when you stop moving the d-pad, Mario will shift an inch or so. His physical presence is such that moving forward in any direction creates an energy that will build until it is released. This can be unnerving in certain areas where platform jumps are incredibly small and I have to figure out how much or how little momentum I have to build in order to land exactly on a single square. Likewise in water levels Mario’s physicality will make swimming challenging because, if I’m not careful, I may push too hard and land directly into a squid or fish.
World 2-Quicksand, that’s what I’m calling it now, pushes the player so that I no longer have to account for just Mario’s weight and momentum, I now also have to factor my environment. Other levels in Super Mario Bros 3 include some environmental factors, but they’re typically ones that players have already become accustomed to: gaps in the floor, navigating motion through water, blocks that will determine trajectory of jumps that need to be made, or platforms that will rise and fall or even sink into the ground once Mario jumps on them. These are familiar elements that I know even by the end of the first few levels.
The angry sun dramatically shifted my understanding of the game.
And clearly I wasn’t the only one struck by this.
My first real reexamination of the Angry Sun character came after watching a Dorkly video on Youtube titled “The Angry Sun Hates Mario.” Explaining jokes is an easy way to kill humor, so I’ll let my reader watch it for themselves. But while watching it I was reminded of the experience of wondering why the sun was so dedicated to trying to kill me.
While researching for this essay I found an article on Kotaku.com written by Kevin Wong titled, “Super Mario Bros. 3's Angry Sun Gave Me Anxiety.” After I nodded and finished saying, “Same dude, same,” I read Wong’s article and appreciated how he manages to capture the panic I experienced while also observing the angry sun as an important design mechanic. He says:
Mario games live and die by their exactitude. The controls are unusually precise, and the rules are simple but consistent. Mario does exactly what you tell him to do, and the environments react, every time, in the way you expect them to.
The Angry Sun level challenges that comfort. Between the quicksand, the weirdly inclined terrain, the Piranha Plants, and the tornado, you get the impression that the environment has rebelled against Mario. Nature itself is your enemy. The figurative solid ground you once stood upon is pulled out from under you.
And then the Angry Sun begins dive-bombing out of the sky.
Wong’s article made me pause and reflect. He was right, it’s not just the sun itself, it’s the whole damn level. The quicksand can quickly swallow me up, and if I have progressed far enough so that the sun is after me then my ability to dodge its strikes is hindered. This happened to me quite a bit when I was younger. Playing the game again recently I accounted for the quicksand and pushing through this level wasn’t the panic-inducing nightmare it had been in my youth but I still appreciated this level as a challenge.
Accounting for Mario’s momentum, the sun’s arc and attack pattern, and the environmental challenges in the form of sand and jumps further complicated by the few koopas that populate this level all contribute to one of the most difficult and simultaneously enjoyable levels of the game at that point.
Yes the sun sent me into panic attacks when I was a kid, and I admit it may have killed me enough times to send me into a rage quitting slump. Despite this I continued and the level has become one of my favorite Mario missions in any video game. The fun of Mario games is recognising the patterns of the levels and determining how to overcome them. Like a great obstacle course, World 2-Quicksand follows the typical pattern of the rest of the areas in World-2, but it manages to provide a challenge to the player to make sure they are not becoming inured or bored by the gameplay.
And what about the story?
The Sun is as much a narrative tool as any element of the game. Mario is trying to save the Mushroom kingdom from Bowser and the Koopalings, and the Sun’s efforts to stop him become a challenge to his conviction to continue. It would be easy to succumb to this obstacle and admit defeat, and I like I said, I succumbed to that failure numerous times. Great games challenge players to test their resolve, and while a number of players may get frustrated by the Angry sun killing them over and over again, it’s a testament to the narrative depth of Super Mario Bros 3 that in spite of this obstacle many resolved themselves to keep playing.
I did eventually beat World 2-Quicksand when I was a kid, moving on to World 3 where a new, similar obstacle would be waiting for me in the form of Boss Bass, an obstacle that I’m still trying to push through almost 20 years on.
In short this level owns dude. It fucking rocks because it’s not fun, at first, and then it is.
The Angry Sun, or maybe as Johnathan Appel notes in an article for hard-drive.net he’s just disappointed, remains one of my favorite enemies in any video game to date because of the way he challenged me to keep trying and eventually move forward to more difficult and challenging levels.
Nothing is more terrifying than the sun, until it isn’t and I’ve moved on to the next great challenge.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.21.2023
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***UPDATE***
I’ve uploaded a video on YouTube of myself reading this essay. You can listen to me read it by following the link below: