Super Mario Maker isn’t just for making your own nightmarish creations. It’s also proving useful as a means of preserving (well, recreating then preserving) Nintendo history.
In 2002, Nintendo released an accessory for the Game Boy Advance called the e-Reader. A product of what I consider the company’s Golden Age Of Weirdness (GameCube LAN! Four Swords!), it plugged into the handheld and acted like a miniature barcode scanner, turning data on printed cards into in-game objects and levels.
It was basically a very early, very Nintendo take on DLC.
As Press the Buttons reminds us, one of the better applications for the e-Reader was for the classic Super Mario Advance 4 (a remake of Super Mario Bros. 3), with a card bringing 30 brand new levels to the game.
Thing is, the e-Reader was a massive flop, meaning most people have never played these levels, as they haven’t been re-released in any format since. Until now!
Baddboy78 and theycallmeshaky have gone through and remade most of the lost Super Mario Advance 4 levels in Super Mario Maker; the only ones missing are those that can’t be recreated (yet) thanks to differences in screen size or the tools available in Mario Maker.
Below is the first of a series of videos where AndrewsGamesDisplay plays through the levels in question on the GBA, so you can get an idea of what they look like:
Obviously, the Mario Maker versions aren’t perfect recreations, but they’re better than nothing!
If you want to try them out, you can find codes for all 25 remade levels here.