See the first level of Super Mario Bros. as a first-person shooter

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Like Doom, but with goombas.

(Image credit: Sean Noonan)

The Mapcore game development community recently challenged designers to take the opening level from one of three games—Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike 1.6, or Super Mario Bros.—and remake it in software of their choice. And that's how we got to see 1-1 as it would play in Unreal.

Level designer Sean Noonan, whose credits include a couple of Far Cry games, Watch Dogs, Star Citizen, and is currently working on Gears: Tactics, took on the challenge. You can follow his progress over the last month on Twitter. He translated the layout into 3D as a series of floating platforms in the sky, which gives it a very Lovely Island look, and since Mario doesn't carry a shotgun or a BFG 9000 Noonan gave him a gun that shoots plungers—thematically appropriate for a plumber.  

All the Mario elements are there, goombas, mushrooms, coins, pipes, the lot. The end result is a tiny bit sacrilegious, while also being a worthy celebration of Nintendo's classic and a fun imagining of how Super Mario Bros. might play in an alternate universe.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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