Upsetting Day: Mario the Music Box🌭

Earlier this month, smirking protagonist factory and childhood ADD manufacturer Illumination released The Super Mario Brothers Galaxy Movie, which, by the already low standards of Super Mario movie adaptations, was widely considered to be a huge piece of shit. It still made over 300 million dollars on its opening weekend. This proves something that Nintendo has been banking on since I was a baby: Mario is a cult leader, and the only thing saving us is that he hasn’t whispered “kill” yet.

Well, there was one time…

Nevermind, I’m getting ahead of myself.

About a decade ago, video game creepypasta had a huge surge. And not just among edgy 12 year olds (there were edgy 13 year olds in there, too). People wrote actual academic articles about it being a merging of folklore and technology or whatever. Enter (Mario): The Music Box, an RPGmaker horror adventure game by artist and programmer CorpseSyndrome. Some might call that name stupid, others might call it foreshadowing. They’re both right.

Edgelord fanfiction. Check. Anime OCs. Check. MADE WITH RPGMAKER. Extra check. This game has “never made it further than a wildly successful Kickstarter and some light criminal fraud” written all over it. It exudes pure “teenager’s first bad idea” energy. The second craziest thing about (Mario) The Music Box is that it actually got made.

Like all the best games, it has an active discord and its own wiki, complete with a section called “the incident.”

We all know what “the incident” is. Every single game has this footnote. The lead developer grew corrupt from their miniscule amount of power and began groping. Right? A tale as old as time, or at least as old as groping. It feels obligatory, but let’s look into (Mario) The Music Box’s incident:

Oh. Oh, that’s…

Huh. You don’t usually see arson and murder called “an incident.”

Let’s check in on the real victims here: The innocent discord community for (Mario) The Music Box. They reacted to this news with the maturity and grace one would expect from a discord community for Nintendo anime OC.

I agree. I do. I certainly think that setting someone on fire is not safe and inclusive. I mean, maybe “inclusive” in the sense that you are including them in the fire. Definitely not safe, though. But, much like calling a fire murder “an incident,” we’re not capturing the scope with this statement. In an ideal world, “a safe and inclusive space” precludes murderers by default. There shouldn’t be an addendum way at the bottom of the safe and inclusive space’s bylaws reading:

*and from now on, murderers will be banned.

Luckily Team Ari had a contingency plan in place so the extended Mario murder fan game universe could continue in case of actual murder. They even had someone in line to inherit Marchionne!

Oh, you’re pretending like you don’t know the iconic original character, Marchionne?

Of course. Marchionne Evangelisti. You just needed the last name to narrow it down, but you remember Marchionne: The alternate Mario who’s a priest, hitman, executioner, and most importantly: aroace. The Wiki tells us he’s “a previous incarnation of Mario who does not share the same consciousness of Mario.” No shit. If we know one thing about Mario: He fucks. It’s the entire basis of the games.

Marchionne is but a single character in a rich tapestry of embarrassment:

You gotta have a possessed evil butcher Luigi in there. Vital character archetype. We got any albino Mario maniacs? This is probably asking too much, can they love cheesecake?

Pretty good I guess, but I was really hoping he’d love-

Perfect.

There’s a distant chance this could be art. What does a cringe anime OC video game look like when it’s made not by an angsty teenager, but an actual insane murderer? This could be a window into a tortured mind, a way to understand the pathology of what drives someone to kill.

I have to know.

My computer is fighting me every step of the way. And rightfully so.

After removing the safeguards that prevent users from playing fangames by murderers (it’s just a check in the display panel), we are off and running. Probably from murderers. The check did warn me about the murderers.

You might be picturing a janky handdrawn mess. No, the game opens with a fully animated cutscene.

Nintendo sends death squads if someone puts a single pixel down on a Metroid fan mod. Yet here’s their official mascot in a violent horror game with these content warnings:

It has a full animation budget and, oh yeah, was spearheaded by an actual murderer, yet here it is, still up ten years later. There’s only one conclusion to draw, and the crazy part is Nintendo will sue me if I say it.

Here’s how the Mario murder game tacitly endorsed by Nintendo starts:

We’re informed that Mario is going to a place – no one ever told him where it was – that eats people alive. Not to investigate the rumors of missing people, but to find the missing people. The writing will not get better.

If you’re hoping to jump on the heads of some spooky goombas who look suspiciously like the developer’s spouse and/or father, keep hoping. It’s cute you can still do that. But no, the game takes place entirely in a Resident Evil-style mansion, and mostly involves wandering around solving the worst puzzles ever created.

When not busy counting objects like a baby, Mario engages in his favorite passtime. Plumbing? Philistine. Real fans know it’s hating artificial plants.

If one thing tells you that the lady who made this game is crazy, it… okay, it’s probably the murdering people and setting them on fire stuff. But the amount of time she spent writing a unique snarky comment for every single sprite of a potted plant has to be a bulletpoint in the DSM somewhere.

Every two minutes you are presented with a binary choice that results in either survival, or a distressingly elaborate Mario death sequence. In the first one, Mario hears a spooky sound and has to either hide, or see what spooky noise is. This is a horror game. Obviously you don’t “investigate noise.” But if you do, beloved bouncing fellow Mairo is eaten by a small child.

In the next room, Mario sees a cliff. He can simply jump across to escape the murder mansion. That’s what our boy does! For the first several games, it was the only thing he could do. When he first appeared as a little block of colors on an arcade cabinet, he was literally named Jumpman. He is two things: A jump, and a man. That order.

Yeah. Time to shine.

Okay cool, hold ‘B’ a little bit. Got it.

What do you want, a feather? Jump, man!

Every decision is this: “Do nothing,” or “Do something and die horribly.” Play the piano?

Take a bath?

Mario regularly beats a fire-breathing dragon in both hand-to-hand combat and go-kart racing. Mario cures diseases by forcing pills into people until their virus is crushed to death. Mario competes at a professional level in Tennis, Soccer, Golf, and every event in the Winter and Summer Olympics. And yet, in this game, Mario dies when he tries to wash himself. This is it, this is the whole game: Baby puzzles, and choosing B when prompted with:

1. Die.
2. Don’t die actually.

That, and looking at anime.

There’s a lot of anime. Not Mario anime, just unremarkable normal anime.

So hey, are the anime people the weird looking ones or are the Marios? Because they are not compatible. Everyone who is not a Mario is an anime, and no one seems to find that weird. Are all the Marios tiny freaks in anime world, or is there a random anime mansion in the Mushroom kingdom? Because these two guys are not the same species:

Anime is not just the primary aesthetic of (Mario) The Music Box, but its core thesis. The plot of every Mario game is that a dragon took your girlfriend and now you have to dress up in fabulous outfits until you forget about her. The plot of this game is that an immortal vampire took an abused little girl as a child bride and then she went nuts and murdered her own children, her sister’s children, and also some butlers. Then she performed a ritual and now all their souls are trapped in baby puzzle hell.

One question- oh, the game’s way ahead of me.

It’s not one-to-one, but already you see there’s some vague foreshadowing of “the incident” in that plot.

It will get… more specific.

If I were CorpseSyndrome’s lawyer, I would be on the phone with Nintendo ahead of trial, doing a silly voice and trying to submit an anonymous tip about copyright infringement. It’s honestly the only move.

In the big finale, Mario gets fully possessed by the insane former child bride which, according to my thesis, is not at all Mario, and therefore extremely anime.

Eventually he’s saved by Luigi, and they free the spirits of the murdered children to break the curse and face off against the queen of ghosts in a final battle. A battle with lifebars. Maybe the most antithetical thing to Mario in the whole game, and there was a picture of him as an undead child bride last paragraph.

Finally, Mario defeats the child murderer and instantly forgives her.

Right! Marchionne. Iconic Marchionne. Where was he? Where was Envy, the Luigi butcher? Where was inverted blueberry cheesecake hitman Mario?

Well, would you believe there was a fucking sequel?

So not only did I play through an entire terrible Mario fangame by an actual murderer, but now I find out I got that brain poison in me and it’s not even the good shit? Okay, let’s get started on (Mario) The Music Box 2–

Wait… what’s that, Luigi?

Oh, it really seems like we should get into the meat of this murderer’s psychoses while we’re here. Right? Right, Mario?

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alpha Scientist Javo, because he is the only one strong enough to find this, research it, and write it up for us. Thanks Javo! Thank you to hell!