Earlier this month, the special game development community Mapcore has challenged their designers to a special project: that is taking the opening level from one of those three games: Unreal Tournament, Half-Life, and Super Mario Bros. - and remake it in gaming software of their choice. Thanks to this contest, the possibility of seeing the iconic 1-1 level from Super Mario Bros. as an FPS game has become a reality.
The remake of level 1-1 was made in Unreal Engine, by level designer Sean Noonan. Noonan was most known for his involvement in many games, including Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Star Citizen. He currently working on the new Gears: Tactics game. His progress with the challenge can be followed on his official Twitter.
As for this challenge, he has first translated the game's layout from 2D into 3D. All the elements in the background of the game have been remade as a bunch of platforms floating in the sky. All those makeovers give the level a look similar to Lovely Island. The new-look from the game is of an FPS, and because Mario does not bring a BFG 9000 or a shotgun with him, Mario was given a gun that shoots out plungers as bullets. Along with that, all the familiar elements from Mario games also make an appearance in the project, including goombas, mushrooms, coins, and pipes.
You can see the end result of the project on the video below:
This project has shown us that given enough care, even a silly-sounding project like this can be a worthy celebration of Nintendo's classic video game title, and can be a real Mario FPS project - that is if Nintendo is chilled with the fan games and ROM hacks. And even if the project cannot be a real game, it still gives us a fun imagining of how a classic title might play - in the world of FPS.