Play Mario 16 Online

I picked up Mario 16 on the NES back in 1993, a year when the system was already crowded with platformers, both official and not. It was one of those unlicensed cartridges you’d find at a flea market or through a mail-order ad, with packaging that felt a little off from the start. Nintendo didn’t publish or develop it; it was one of those third-party efforts that tried to cash in on the Mario name with a quick reskin of some other game, probably something obscure or imported.

You control Mario through a series of side-scrolling levels, jumping on enemies and breaking blocks just like in the familiar games, but something always feels slightly wrong. The objective is still to reach the flagpole at the end of each stage, but the level layouts are jumbled, and the physics are inconsistent. You might notice altered enemy sprites, level themes that don’t match the Mario universe, and occasional glitches when landing jumps. The difficulty is uneven, sometimes too easy because of broken mechanics, other times unfairly hard due to poor design. Playing it feels like walking through a familiar dream where everything is just a little out of place.