So I realized something last night. Something big. Mario is nothing more than a metaphor for the internet. Hell, it was a metaphor for the internet that, in many ways, predicted the internet as it stands!

Mario goes along one day, minding his own business and ends up in a series of tubes. Once there he finds that he has to keep moving because there’s no going back once you’re stuck in a series of tubes. He finds lands that seem to be outdoors, and yet, they are all somehow inside. While there he can only run forward as fast as he can, zooming through life as fast as possible, slowing to leap up and crush things smaller, slower and weaker than himself. Everything he sees is incomprehensible compared to what he grew up with but it quickly becomes commonplace.

At first the creatures take two major forms: Small troll like beings that lumber back and forth and back and forth forever exploring ground they’ve covered and slightly faster beings that, when hit, can come back to hit Mario even worse.

Mario has only one true quest – to find an actual female in this strange land. Every time he gets close he has to dodge flames and fight a large troll, only to find that the female is not where he was told she would be. No, he is given another site to try and fight his way through. Untangling false promises and never-ending sluggish stupidity, Mario races forward in blind hope of reward.

Eventually he gets the girl. Except then she goes back into the tubes and he is back where he started. He drags family and friends along, some of them he only met in the tubes themselves. Now growing his social circle, they all compete, even the token female of the group, in finding this mythical woman.

This is his crew: Luigi, Mario’s brother who moves much faster than Mario and yet is totally spastic, Yoshi who would have once frightened Mario and yet now aligns with him, eating anything in his way, consuming media and people as fast as he spots them and the Princess searches for the lost female who is “just like her” fulfilling Mario’s dreams of girl-on-girl action.

Later chronicles include: Mario posing as a doctor, Waluigi, a guy who claims to be evil and yet just plays millions of tiny mini-games in his spare time, Toad who looks like a possible troll creature and yet uses this to mask his amazing strength, used to remove other troll beings by simply throwing them right off the tubes.

The longer this all goes on the more Mario seems to forget what he had before he was lost in a series of tubes, choosing to find new friends and abandon his old life. He lives there, gather friends and fighting them, racing them, playing games with them and exploring new sections of the tubes. He doesn’t see his own sickness, choosing instead to dress up in furry animal costumes, take untested drugs and anger troll beings until he decides to search for more theoretical women.

Nintendo was ahead of its time.