An early unofficial Mario game which was done in early 1983. At the moment , we do not know for sure if this game actually got released – but Jeremy Thorne’s other game – Mario’s Brewery was released in 1983, without official Nintendo endorsement.
Thanks to a blog post here, we learn from the comments that Jeremy was just 14 when he wrote the game, and was part of a series of three titles, including Mario’s Brewery and Firefighter Mario (which we digitally preserved in December 2015). They were written for 4K cartridges, hence were very simple affairs!
Pubjumper Mario was described by Jeremy as a Popeye clone, featuring a large bouncer in Bluto’s role. For years it was lost, but in March 2021 – it was released by Army of Darkness and found by Black Beard.
Yet another long lost title found that you can finally play thanks to their efforts, and yet another unreleased game case closed! Check it out!
Contributions: Optic Freeze, Black Beard
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_PubjumperMario (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Jeremy Thorne speaks about his games via this blog post:
“Jeremy Thorne here. I definitely owe the C64 community an explanation for this awful game.
I was 14 in 1983, in high school and working in my spare time for a 2% royalty: I wrote cartridge games (in raw machine code) for a local shop with no QA or scruples. They wanted to capitalize very early on the lack of software for the C64 by churning out arcade knockoff cartridge games as quickly as they could manage. It worked. They sold several thousand of these!
FYI, on one other site some users complained about not knowing how to get to the next level. Jump on the switch. There are only two levels, though, since I was only given a 4K ROM to work with for the cartridge! So I was actually working not so much on a C-64 as a C-4.
I also wrote Pubjumper Mario (A “Popeye” knockoff, featuring a large bouncer in Bluto’s role) and Firefighter Mario (A “Vanguard” knockoff with Mario in a fire truck spraying water to put out fireball enemies.) I don’t know if anyone managed to save those. They were marginally better games, which isn’t saying much. I wonder if I have copies of those old cartridges sitting around anywhere…”
Update history
04/03/21 – Game found and added, case closed!
