Feature: How Super Mario World Became An Award-Winning Book Of Verse

Most of us have some childhood memory of games – be it Pokémon Blue, Tetris, or Super Mario Bros. When we dust off those old consoles, the games often trigger memories of our lives outside the screen too.

In his heart-wrenching series of poems, If All the World and Love Were Young, Stephen Sexton put this idea poetic into practice. Published in 2019, the book ties one of his most difficult experiences, his mother’s illness and passing, to his favourite game, Super Mario World.

We were lucky enough to have the chance to interview Stephen, and ask him about his remarkable poetry collection, the presence of games in literature, and what he’s playing now.

Nintendo Life: How did the idea for If All the World and Love Were Young come about?

Stephen Sexton: I started it by accident. As part of a Creative Writing PhD project, I was writing poems responding to paintings or photographs and I became increasingly bored. In a fit of mischief, I thought, why not take a familiar image instead of a classical one?

I think we all feel, on some level, like Super Mario World is our own private space

Out of nowhere, really, came Super Mario World’s landscapes. It’s my favourite game, and I think the most perfect. I started to write a poem for every level, from Yoshi’s Island to the Forest of Illusion, treating them as real places. Partway in, I felt more and more drawn to the memories of playing, in my house in the countryside, looking out the window into the ‘real’ world. My mother was still alive then (she died in 2012), and the longer I thought about my childhood, the more I thought about her. Suddenly, I was writing a book about grief – something buried so deeply I had to trick myself into writing about it.

Can you tell us a bit about the contrast between the game’s playfulness and the seriousness of grief and love?

The book is about my mother’s illness and death, mapped onto the journey of Super Mario World. The speaker of these poems can’t see the cactus wandering about Yoshi’s Island without thinking of needles and chemotherapy. They can’t enter a ghost house without thinking about their own house, lonely and haunted.

Grief does strange things to the world: it makes it both unreal and hyperreal; the death of a parent makes you more aware of your child-ness but also, abruptly, your grownup-ness. For me, this book is caught between those two positions: the unadulterated play and silliness of childhood, compared with the worlds of adulthood: age and illness, loss and responsibility.

And you connected many of the game’s locations to real spaces?

Across the book and game, there’s a trajectory from home to the unknown. Yoshi’s Island is a kind of domestic space, so all of the Yoshi’s Island poems are full of images from the real place I grew up. As the game goes outwards, to Donut Plains, I looked at Northern Ireland, where I live, which is not unlike Donut Plains: there’s a lough in the middle, some famous caves in the west (the Marble Arch Caves in Fermanagh – Donut Plains 2), a famous rope bridge on the north coast (Carrick-a-Rede). From there, I followed the story I’m telling – Vanilla Dome, underground, becomes a place of sedation and surgery, then the mountain top. Forest of Illusion becomes the strange new world; the Valley of Bowser casts Bowser as a kind of death figure. I could go on!

Your collection gives a language to Super Mario World’s recognisable visual style, with lovely lyrical descriptions: ‘carnivorous plants’, ‘the veins of ivy vines, ‘joyful blue-white puffer fish’… Can you talk a bit about the imagery in your poems?

I decided not to punctuate the lines – to have this energetic, jangly propulsion imitating Mario’s movements

I’m delighted you think that! It was incredibly important to me to try to make my language mirror what it feels like to look at or play Super Mario World. It wasn’t enough to retell the story of the game. SMW’s most striking quality is how it looks and feels. I’ve aimed to do something interesting with the look and feel of these poems, as well as their sounds; the lines of the poems are quite intense in their strings of words. SMW is also fluid, so I decided not to punctuate the lines – to have this energetic, jangly propulsion imitating Mario’s movements.

So you were, in a sense, converting the levels to poetry?

On one level, I think about If All the World and Love Were Young as a kind of translation: I aimed to find a way in English (and in poetry) to represent playing that game, especially as an adult looking back at their childhood and everything that’s happened in between. That’s really what this book is about: trying to record what it feels like to look back at one’s childhood.

Did you revisit and play the game while you were writing?

I did. To start with, I studied screenshots and tried to remind myself of the textures and colours of Mario’s world, but one of its great triumphs is what it feels like to play the game. There’s no way to appreciate it only by watching it. So yes, I spent many, many hours of literary research playing Super Mario World.

How was that experience, re-playing the game as an adult?

What surprised me is how much of it was automatic. Its physics and conventions and puzzles were already part of my memory, there was nothing I had to learn again. I found this amazing and, in some ways, reassuring.

As an enthusiast of technology, I’m fascinated by what the makers of Super Mario World managed to do with such a tiny (compared to today) amount of RAM. I wanted to intertwine machine memory – fixed, unchanging – with my own memories. The game became my mnemonic device: through it, I could recall childhood moments I’d forgotten: fumbling with the cables at the back of the TV when we first plugged in the Nintendo, inching through the Special World – a kind of glimpse of that game’s afterlife, I always thought. So much of my childhood was there, waiting for me to return.

Was there anything you noticed in the game then that you hadn’t before?

Yes, one thing I did determine, is that the Koopas must certainly be a version of the kappa – the Japanese mythological creature with a dish of water on its head, who can be defeated by spilling its water. Perhaps by jumping on its head…?

Have you played many other Nintendo games? And what are you playing now?

I’ve spent a long time with Pokémon over the years. I remember the first craze! And of course Mario’s one-time nemesis, Donkey Kong. Nintendo’s talent for feeling is unsurpassed. More recently I’ve been enjoying the new Zelda games – they’re profound achievements in adventure and sensation. But some of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had are playing Super Mario Kart with my brother in our house. We know every inch of those tracks; every tendency and tactic of our fellow racers. I couldn’t tell you how many laps of those circuits I’ve done, nor how many times I’ve won or lost. Almost nothing touches the thrill of those races.

What has the response from Mario fans been like?

Many Mario fans have been extremely generous and enthusiastic about the book, which is a real thrill. Often, our relationship with the screen and the controller is ours alone. For that reason, I think we all feel, on some level, like Super Mario World is our own private space. With this book, I’ve taken that idea quite far: my Super Mario World now has one of the most significant and difficult experiences of my life wound through its code. So, I realise there’s a lot of responsibility to make my version of SMW recognisable to other people and for it to respect the Super Mario Worlds of my fellow players. In some ways, there are as many Yoshi’s Islands as players; we all enter that space on our own.

That’s really interesting. I think many of us find that games are a source of comfort in hard times. Would you say that’s true for you?

the video game can be a deeply engaging, imaginative experience: players are inventive and curious, able to interpret signs and symbols. These are the skills poetry readers have too.

That’s definitely true. What games represent, or what Super Mario World represents for me, is a kind of stability. Although it’s another world from the ‘real’ world, it exists in our ‘real world’ and so when our lives become complicated or frustrating or mournful, we crave something fixed and familiar. Sometimes people tend to think of video games as escapism. I’ve never really liked that idea, and I imagine many players don’t either. Games aren’t separate from our lives; they are not things we retreat to. We are active and present playing video games, focussed and thoughtful.

I did not want to escape from the experience of grief, however hard it is. I wanted desperately not to forget it. And so much of that experience was pinned to my memories of SMW. In a time of tremendous emotional stress, SMW was much more real to me than my real life.

Have you found there’s much overlap between poetry readers and Mario players?

There have been people who may not read poetry who came to the book for the Mario. But it doesn’t surprise me that people who like video games might like poetry, or literature more broadly. Sometimes, people who don’t understand video games think it’s a passive experience, that one sits before a screen doing nothing. What we know is the video game can be a deeply engaging, imaginative experience: players are inventive and curious, able to interpret signs and symbols. These are the skills poetry readers have too.

I agree. Do you think you would include links to games in your future writing?

Mario is always special, but yes, I expect video games will continue to be in my writing, or the techniques of video games. There’s so much anyone can learn from games, about how to welcome a reader or a viewer.

But more generally, my early imagination was formed by games, much more than TV, for example. The difference is activity and passivity. The first experiences I had of art or image, besides bedtime stories, were related to play. For me, play is an essential element of writing or making.

And, on that note, are there any Easter eggs you included for savvy fans?

Oh, hundreds. We all know how much players love Easter eggs. There’s the idea of questions floating in the air, one way of rendering the curious boxes floating through Mario’s world. I made a murmuration of starlings (which do their entrancing flights around a bridge in Belfast) resembling Shigeru Miyamoto’s thumbprint.

One of the most moving parts of that game for me is the moment in the level Funky where the game says ‘You are a Super Player ! !’ in coins. When I first saw it, I was a little overwhelmed. The game knows I’m here, I thought to myself. This modest, fourth-wall moment exhilarated me, so I wanted to do the same in my book. So much of the book’s journey is one from childhood to experience: becoming self-aware, as the game seems to do at that point, as do the names of the levels in the Special Zone: Tubular, Mondo, Way Cool. At that moment, the book directly addresses the reader, and thanks them – as I thank you now – for being my travelling companion.

Many thanks to Stephen for taking the time to speak with us.

If All the World and Love Were Young is published by Penguin and available in all good bookshops, and probably a few bad ones, too — if such things can exist. And if you’ve got a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, Super Mario World is available to play on Switch.

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