Play It By Trust (Sky Blue Super Mario Bros.)

Play Play It By Trust Online (Desktop only)

Download the Play It By Trust ROM (for your NES emulator of choice)

Description

The sky is sky blue! The ground is sky blue! The coins are sky blue! The goombas are sky blue! Bowser is sky blue! You are sky blue! Play it by trust!

Play It By Trust (Sky Blue Super Mario Bros.) is a “ROM hack” of Super Mario Bros. for the NES in which I set every colour in every colour palette to the “sky blue” from the game (coded in as $02). It’s a purple-ish blue, apparently chosen specifically by Shigero Miyamoto because he just liked it.

The game is specifically an homage/reference/exploration of Yoko Ono’s classic work “Play It By Trust (White Chess Set) (1966)” which is a chess set in which all the pieces are white, with the core idea being that if you play with someone you will inevitably lose track of which pieces are yours and which are theirs, and then “there’s a moment when you feel like it really doesn’t matter which pieces are yours or the opponent’s.” There’s a really great discussion from Ono herself (I think) on the page linked above.

Inevitably there’s also some conversation with Cory Archangel’s “Super Mario Clouds,” though not all that much from my perspective. Mostly I just wanted to make a quick idea, partly I wanted to ask (and let players ask) what the correspondences and contrasts with Ono’s work there might be when we do this to a videogame (instead of chess).

Play It By Trust (Sky Blue Super Mario Bros.) was created using Hex Fiend to edit the hex codes in a ROM of Super Mario Bros.. I referred to the Data Crystal wiki’s section detailing the locations of the palettes in the game in order to edit at the correct memory locations, replacing every colour with $02 (the blue of the sky in the overworld levels). The game is available in the browser thanks to JSNES.

Documentation

• Read the Process documentation
• Read the Commit History (not super-duper relevant to this project)
• Look at the Code Repository

Press

I didn’t bother making a press kit, sorry. Here’s a screenshot, haha:

License

Given that I did not create Super Mario Bros., my act of changing its colours, while rendering it unplayable, does not make it mine. So, no license involved here.