It can be easy to forget, especially with all of the excitement and confusion over this week’s Super Mario-related announcements, that the LEGO Super Mario set that debuted this summer boasts some pretty impressive technology for what’s essentially a pile of plastic bricks. It’s impressive enough, in fact, that one modder figured out how to use it to play the original Super Mario Bros.
What’s neat about the LEGO Mario set is the way it not only allows fans young and old to replicate the Mushroom Kingdom with LEGOs, it also comes with an interactive element that lets players recreate the games’ platforming experiences as well. This is thanks to the unique LEGO Mario figurine that comes with built-in features like motion sensors that register different types of movement and a camera in its base that keeps track of the type of platforms it’s being placed on.
Taking advantage of these features, a modder who goes by Rick on Twitter devised a way to convert the figurine into a functioning controller for Super Mario Bros., by way of a Linux-based NES emulator. He showed how it works in a video shared this week. To make Mario move left and right in-game, Rick tilts the figurine forward and backward, while lifting the figurine upwards makes Mario jump.
This left viewers wondering a few things, namely if Rick can go down pipes and shoot fireballs using the LEGO Mario. He revealed in a second video that yes, he can, though it requires a few extra props. For fireballs, he explained that that works by placing a figurine on a red title, which is then detected by the figurine’s color-sensing camera. Pipes, meanwhile, work by placing the figurine on the pipe that comes with the rest of the LEGO Super Mario Starter Course set.
The result is a way of playing Super Mario Bros. that, while super impractical, still manages to work surprisingly well. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine people being able to play through the whole game this way, though then again, it’s nothing new for people to play Mario games with unusual controllers. On that note, Rick said he intends to share the program he’s using for anyone to use, once he’s cleaned up the code a little more.
This is just one example of just how versatile the Nintendo LEGO sets are proving to be. Case in point, another modder recently showed off how they were able to convert the LEGO NES into a functioning NES emulator. Of course, LEGOs are designed to encourage creativity, but it’s safe to say these modding efforts are starting to take things to a whole different level.
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