Great Game Stories, No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins)

Once upon a time, a hero came home from a long and heroic journey, tired and proud, only to find that a stranger had moved into his house. Not just any house: his castle. And not just any stranger, but a big, greedy, purple-and-yellow fellow with a moustache almost as grand as Mario's own. This is the tale of the day Mario had to win back his very own front door.

Six golden coins: the world's most inconvenient front-door key.

It is a story about coming home, about a rival nobody had ever met before, and about six shining coins scattered to the far corners of a very odd little land. Settle in, because this is where one of gaming's greatest scoundrels first swaggered onto the stage.

The Characters

Our hero, once again, is Mario, and the cartridge that tells his story is Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. Mario returns from his travels expecting a warm welcome and a quiet nap, and instead finds his own home locked against him and his own people turned into strangers.

The villain, and the true breakout star of the tale, is Wario. This was his very first appearance anywhere, and what an entrance it is. Wario is Mario's greedy rival, a big, grasping fellow who has been jealous of Mario since they were small, and who wants nothing so much as a grand castle to call his own. While Mario was off being a hero, Wario simply took Mario's castle for himself.

Worse still, Wario cast an evil spell over the good folk of the island, brainwashing them so that they would serve him and turn against their old friend Mario. To keep the castle safe, he handed six golden coins to six fearsome guardians and hid them across the land. Without those coins, the castle door will not open, and so the whole adventure is set.

The World

This time the whole tale unfolds on Mario's own island, a land entirely his own, with his beloved castle standing at its very heart. Spread around that castle are six strange and marvellous zones, each one its own little world, and Mario is free to wander into them in almost any order he chooses.

There is the Tree Zone, an enormous tree crawling with giant insects. There is the Macro Zone, a house so gigantic that Mario shrinks to the size of a mouse among its everyday clutter. There is the Pumpkin Zone, a haunted jack-o-lantern of graveyards and ghostly houses. There is the Mario Zone, a colossal mechanical statue built in Mario's own likeness, humming with gears. There is the Turtle Zone, a watery world tucked inside a giant tortoise. And high above them all floats the Space Zone, out among the moon and the stars where gravity turns feather-light.

Wario's villain debut: a whole game just to answer his own front door.

The Adventure

Mario's task is simple to say and hard to do: gather all six golden coins, one held by the boss of each zone, and only then can he unlock the castle. Along the way he finds old friends and new tricks. The fire flower is here as always, and a brand new charm too: the Carrot, which sprouts a pair of rabbit ears on Mario's cap so he can flap them and glide gently down through the air.

In the Tree Zone he must climb past swarms of bugs to face the Big Bird who guards the branches. In the Macro Zone, tiny and vulnerable, he faces a giant rat far larger than himself. In the Pumpkin Zone he braves the ghosts and their mistress, a cackling Witch. And in the Mario Zone, deep inside the great clockwork statue, he must outwit the Three Little Pigs waiting at the machine's heart.

In the watery Turtle Zone, an octopus lurks hidden inside a whale, and Mario must swim it down to claim his coin. And in the far Space Zone, drifting among the stars, he meets an old foe: Tatanga, the very alien who once tried to marry Princess Daisy, now working as a hired guardian for Wario. Defeat him, and the sixth and final coin is Mario's at last.

Spoiler Alert: How It Ends

With all six golden coins gathered, the great locked door of the castle finally swings open. Mario climbs up through his own twisted halls, now dark and full of Wario's guards, all the way to the top, where the greedy newcomer himself is waiting with a grin.

Wario does not go quietly. He fights in one puffed-up form after another, growing larger, snatching Mario's own power-ups and turning fiery and quick, but Mario keeps his head and wears the bully down. At last Wario shrinks to a tiny, sulking little figure and scurries away in defeat. The spell over the island snaps, the good folk wake as if from a dream, and the castle is Mario's once more. As for Wario, he slinks off nursing his bruised pride and dreaming of a castle of his own, which, as it happens, becomes a story all his own.

If you would like to see the little cartridge that first introduced the world to Wario, you can find Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins resting in the collection. Come and visit it at the Game Boy Museum.