New on the Shelf: When Super Mario Land Became a Pop Song

Not every Game Boy artefact plugs into a cartridge slot. Some of them you play on a stereo. This arrival is one of the strangest and most joyful objects the collection has taken in: a compact disc, from 1993, built entirely around a Game Boy game, credited to Ambassadors of Funk featuring MC Mario.

M.C. Mario - The funky side of Mario

What It Is

This is a United States dance-music release from 1993, put out by Warlock Records and dedicated to Super Mario Land, one of the Game Boy's defining early games. It is a studio project rather than a soundtrack, pop music that takes a video game as its subject, complete with the game's melodies woven into a club-ready production. It is one of only two Game Boy-related music releases in the collection, sitting alongside a Technician 2 vinyl record from the United Kingdom.

A Game Boy Game in the Pop Charts

The side-story here is genuinely remarkable. "Super Mario Land" by Ambassadors of Funk featuring MC Mario was a real chart hit, climbing into the upper reaches of the UK singles chart around Christmas 1992, an era when novelty and video-game records could go toe to toe with the biggest pop acts of the day. For a brief moment, a track named after a handheld platformer was competing for radio play and chart positions, proof of just how far the Game Boy and its games had seeped into mainstream culture barely three years after launch.

Game Boy Music

Game Boy Music

It belongs to a wider early-nineties craze for turning game themes into dancefloor tracks, the same impulse that produced records built on the tunes from Tetris and other Nintendo hits. Most were cheerfully disposable, which is exactly why they are interesting now: they were commercial products of their moment, made to be played once at a party and forgotten, and very few survive in clean, complete condition. As a physical object, this CD is a small monument to the point where gaming culture and pop culture briefly, gloriously overlapped.

Why It Joined the Collection

A collection about the Game Boy is really a collection about the console's reach, and few things measure that reach better than music made in its honour. This CD documents a moment when a Game Boy game escaped the screen entirely and turned up on the radio, and it pairs with the collection's Technician 2 vinyl to form a tiny but telling sub-collection of Game Boy pop. Keeping it preserves a side of the phenomenon that the hardware and the cartridges simply cannot show: the sound of the Game Boy in the wider world.

The Ambassadors of Funk / MC Mario CD is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.