You guys got it. Sorry if that was mean, but I was wanting to see how long it would take our brightest gaming historians to figure out one of the most recognizable games in the world. I work in IT, and there are a ton of time where I skip right past the obvious, looking for the much more difficult answer/solution.
It's not the first time it's been tried in this thread, and I'm sure it won't be the last! Indeed, thinking about this has got me musing on this thread in general and my approach to the problems it brings up:
There's a few times this sort of thing have happened innocently; games that we've tended to dismiss as 'just too obvious', which happened to be the thing the requester was indeed asking for. Or occasionally it's turned up in the form of them remembering a specific scene, without realising it was part of a game they're already familiar with.
At the other end of the scale, there's a few games that have cropped up in this thread so frequently that - while they're quite obscure - they're occasionally things I'd think of *first*. Skyroads is a good example there; not a
terribly well-known game, but it's been the mystery game something like six or seven times now. Incoming's another one of that ilk, and the various games in the Super Solvers family.
One other bit of obfuscation you managed that I'm not even sure was a conscious choice was that fact that I'll generally try to deduce some plausible avenues based on reasonable assumption about the circumstances of the person asking; for instance, recollections are *likely* to be of early levels in the game, particularly for older, harder games, simply by virtue of the fact that that's all they'll have seen. Demos, Shareware or freeware crops up often, because as a kid with access to a home computer in the 1990s or therabouts, that was a common source of new stuff and demos in particular are likely to have been a fleeting enough experience that you'd end up only slight recollection of the occasional scene that made an impact. In your case, bringing up the PC version made it significantly
more obscure, because of the situation where both Super Mario Bros Special is
itself not well-known, but also the fact that it's fairly unlikely you'd have really been in a situation where you'd have encountered it.
Another one is the fact that half-remembered games are generally only recalled in the context that is actually depicted
on-screen. The mention of the portal into a strange world might be established in the SMB backstory, but it's not actually visible in the game (although now I'm wondering if that might be explained in the arcade cabinet artwork? Not really sure when the transition went away from arcade cabinet artworks that explained the basic game rules!)
One of these days - when I can face the effort involved! - I'm going to go through this thread and pick out key features of recollection for people for various games, maybe try to form a database of half-remembered stuff.
) I have no idea.
