Super Mario, also named “Super Mario Bros”， is a famous game series firstly released by Japanese game company Nintendo in 1985. Over 262 million copies of games in the Super Mario series have been sold worldwide, making it the best –selling video game series in history.① after the success in carrying out the legend of Super Mario adventures, Nintendo developed tons of other Super Mario games like Super Mario racing and Super Mario tennis. With the great infect of Super Mario Bros these following games were also successful. Cat Mario, also named Troll Mario or The impossible Mario, developed by Japanese gamers in 2011, is a game based on Super Mario adventures but a rather modified new game with many added troll traps. While the goal of Super Mario is to collect gold coins and save the princess at the end, there seems to be no goal in Cat Mario, probably gamers should just try to die as less as possible.
While fun exists in both games, original Mario games are challenging gamers with tasks, traps and monsters, Cat Mario seems to have no such settings of “mission”。 Although gamers can still collect gold coins and mushrooms, they were totally useless, players even have countless lives (they made it minus
health in Cat Mario) so what made this game attractive?
After playing Cat Mario, the definition of “ troll” came up into my mind : a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people②。 Although Cat Mario seems to be similar to Super Mario, they were totally different games. In Super Mario games, the developers tried
to make gamers think, and avoid being trapped. Those games prize agility and reaction speed a lot, for those pro gamers they can probably escape some traps even they activated it, but in Cat Mario gamers can hardly escape from any traps without dying couple of times. In other words, in Super Mario games players are trying to stay alive and get the goal, in Cat Mario gamers are just enjoying dying in so much different ways and being trolled.
On another hands, since Cat Mario is an obvious troll game, people are feeling freer to die and and enjoying traps which they were angry at in Super Mario. Instead of staring at the screen focusing so that they can escape, Cat Mario players can even press a single → button and wait for their deaths. “I will have to die anyways”， said Max, one of my friend who played this game. From the perspective of a game developer, both of them are super successful games. It is also a typical example showing how much joy a troll game can bring to people, bonded with laugh and experience of making fun of themselves.