A Manually-Powered Super Mario Game!

If you’ve ever played Super Mario Bros. — or really any side-scroller — you may have had a passing thought that a simple version of the game could be made by moving actual paper and some sort of mechanical player. More than likely you then went about your day, perhaps continuing to play the digital game that produced this fleeting inspiration. Rick P — who has never actually played Super Mario Brothers — decided to actually create such a game, printing Mario's first level out on paper that is moved by a series of rollers.

This scrolling is controlled by a hand crank, linked to the driving roller by an angled screwdriver extension and faucet hose. Mario’s up and down movements are correspondingly mechanical, as he "jumps" up and down via a hand lever and gear/pulley system. No sort of object detection is currently implemented, so as long as there’s no mechanical failure Mario will make it to the end of the level. It's meant as a proof-of-concept for a larger scrolling design, with the idea that RFID tags would be used for object detection.

The build isn't entirely free of electronics, however, as an Arduino board implemented in this version to play the Mario theme song via a nearby speaker. An interrupter board and gear setup starts this music automatically.

It’s an interesting project that I hope we’ll see taken further in the future. Rick notes this isn’t an entirely new idea, as he was able to find a cardboard Mario game, and even a 1940s-era arcade game called “Atomic Bomber” that used a similar scrolling concept.