When you think of Mario, chances are always high that you instantly think of the Super Mario Brothers franchise. If asked to pick other game that our beloved plumber was in, you will almost always say as a second game, Donkey Kong. If you needed to try again, you might say the original Mario Brothers title. A different one? Super Mario World! Wait, that’s not it? You don’t mean Wrecking Crew or Hotel Mario, did you? No? Good. Oh, you mean portable? Super Mario Land! It’s gotta be! No? Okay, I give up. What? “Mario Clash” for Virtual Boy? You’ve got to be kidding! No kidding. This week, we are going to be taking a look at a game that is simple, lots of fun to play, but never got the recognition that it deserved based on format.

Mario Clash was released for the Virtual Boy on October 1, 1995 in the United States, and a few days previously, on September 28, 1995 in Japan. It was the first game in the Mario franchise to be three-dimensional, and was developed by Nintendo R&D1, the same group of people who were responsible for the development of the Virtual Boy console itself. The team made the Virtual Boy system solely because they felt that the public was not ready for the next generation of consoles at the time, with the failures of systems like the CD-i, Jaguar and 3DO formats. Something revolutionary was thought up: A console that created 2D images in a 3D way. The team needed to make some software to show off the new technology, and this game, along with Mario Tennis, were the final outcomes. Chances are however, that even if you have never played Mario Clash, or even if you never owned or touched a Virtual Boy system at all in your lifetime, that you have actually played Mario Clash at some point. See, Mario Clash is nothing more than a port of the original Mario Brothers title from 1983. Of course, there are a lot of differences between the two titles, with the technology side being the culprit this time around.

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