Ennuigi
I never got into video game consoles, but I loved Mario Bros. on the original Nintendo as a kid.
Now, Josh Millard has developed a sequel of sorts: Ennuigi, in which we are invited to “spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.”
This is a shot at a collection of ideas I had a few years ago, about looking critically at the universe of Super Mario Bros. in light of the total lack of explicit narrative in the original game in particular. Who are these strange men? What motivates them? By what right do they wreak the havoc they do on this strange place? What do they feel about where they are and what they’re doing?
And so, this is one lens through which to look at all that, with Luigi, the second brother, the also-ran, as a complicit onlooker, wandering now through some fractured, rotting liminal place in this strange world, reflecting on it all in scattered fragments.
What do you think, Nintendo fans?
August 14, 2015 at 9:41 pm
this is sheer genius. like Deep Thoughts by Jacque Sartre.
thanks for sharing!!!
August 18, 2015 at 1:36 pm
Perfectly encapsulated. 😉
August 15, 2015 at 5:47 am
Oh man, what a great idea! I played only a little bit of the NES but I played a whole lot of Mario on the Game Boy. It’s true, games like this seem utterly bizarre when you think about it. A couple of guys descending on some surreal world to slaughter its native mushrooms…
August 18, 2015 at 1:35 pm
So true…but it was such a great game. 🙂