Full Screen Mario

» see fullscreenmario.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Josh Goldberg was a computer science junior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when he and a friend worked out loud about how good it would be to play Mario in a browser tab. He started building in October 2012 and had a working demo the following month. The finished thing carried all thirty two levels of the 1985 original, and it added a level editor and a generator that would throw a random map at you.

He put it on GitHub in January 2013 and almost nobody noticed for nine months. Then in October a writer at Boing Boing posted about it, and fullscreenmario.com went from a student project to roughly three hundred thousand visits a day.

The appeal was how little it asked of you. No emulator to install and no ROM file to go find, just an address you could paste to someone at work. It ran on the HTML5 canvas, it stretched to a widescreen monitor in a way the 1985 game never could, and you could plug in an Xbox 360 controller if you had one lying around.

By 2013 I was a computer engineer in my late twenties and a Mario link in a browser tab was not going to rearrange my afternoon. The interesting part was underneath. Somebody had rebuilt the collision and the scrolling in JavaScript by hand, accurately enough that the jump felt right, which is the part a programmer notices and the part a rights holder has no reason to care about.

~ the case file ~

~ the november letter ~

On 1 November 2013, about a month into the traffic, Goldberg took the project down after a DMCA complaint from Nintendo. The stated grounds were that it infringed the copyright in the original game and that it sat too close to something Nintendo already had in development. By the day it came down, nearly 2.7 million people had played it.

The source code was a separate matter, and it stayed on GitHub where anyone could download and run their own copy. That lasted until 2016, when Nintendo sent a second complaint and the repository went too.

~ the sequel question ~

Super Mario Maker shipped in 2015 with a level editor at the center of it, and Goldberg told the Washington Post the following year that seeing it felt like an expansion of what he had built. He has been careful about the claim and has not pushed it further than that. What he has said plainly is that Nintendo never contacted him directly about the site, before the notice or after it.

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