Virtual Mario

If there's ever a game where you can say you don't know what you're looking at, it's Virtual Mario. A crystalline attempt at making Mario work in three-dimensional space, which didn't even get the manufacturer's name or a decent budget. The result? A strange creation you'll find today mainly in archives of old DOS games.

It's an exploratory 3D platformer — or rather, something that thought it would be one — where Luigi (or Mario, the specs aren't clear) jumps across abstractly designed levels. The goal is the usual: collect things, overcome obstacles, get somewhere. In the mid-nineties, this was a huge step for anyone who tried to take iconic 2D characters and throw them into a polygonal world. The problem: hardware and development time clearly weren't enough.

Spatial orientation is painful. The camera doesn't love you, jumping in three dimensions requires an intuition that the game practically doesn't train. Movement feels like swimming against the current — the controls work, but as if you're trying to maneuver a brick in a claustrophobic tunnel. Without clear visual feedback, it's not at all obvious where the player is or exactly where to jump. The levels are dull, monotonous, lacking the playfulness the original 2D entries had.

Virtual Mario shouldn't be underestimated — it was a sincere attempt made by a handful of people in the 90s without a big team and budget. It didn't stick in memory because it simply wasn't sensitive enough. Super Mario 64 for N64 came out the same year and knew how to do it right. Comparing them, Virtual Mario looks like a finished prototype, not a final game.

Try playing it in DOSBox mainly out of curiosity. Want to understand how things were experimented with and what didn't work? Here you see it raw. It's not a bad game, it's just forgotten — and for good reason in many ways. Forty minutes is enough to understand why it doesn't even sell in the cheapest collections.