Sega Genesis / Mega Drive · 1994 · China / Taiwan · Bootleg Hack
Mario on a Sega console — achieved by hacking a bootleg Chip 'n Dale game and dropping in stolen Super Mario All-Stars graphics, with the can-can playing on the menu.
This is a bootleg of a bootleg. The base is Squirrel King, an unlicensed Genesis platformer loosely modelled on Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, probably connected to the Taiwanese developer Gamtec. Unknown hands then hacked Squirrel King, replaced Chip and Dale with Mario and Luigi, and released it as 超級瑪莉兄弟 — Super Mario Bros. — putting Nintendo's mascot on Sega hardware, which is roughly the most transgressive thing a 1994 cartridge could do. The construction is a study in mixed provenance. The level graphics were lifted from the Super Mario All-Stars rendition of Super Mario Bros. on the SNES. The Mario, Luigi and enemy sprites, by contrast, are entirely original work by the bootleggers, and are not good. The first two acts were replaced with levels drawn from Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, each capped with Bowser as a boss. Two new music tracks were added: the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme, and — for the main menu, for no reason anyone has ever established — the "Infernal Galop" from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, better known as the can-can.
Putting Mario on a Sega Genesis, via a chain of theft two links long
The reason this cartridge exists in this particular shape is purely economic. Building a Genesis platformer from scratch is expensive; hacking one that already exists is nearly free. Squirrel King was available, already unlicensed, already running, and already a platformer with a two-character premise — so replacing its two rodents with two plumbers was the shortest possible path to the one thing that would actually sell a cartridge in a Chinese street market in 1994, which was Mario's face on the box.
The graphical strategy follows the same logic. Backgrounds and tiles were lifted wholesale from Super Mario All-Stars because copying them was cheap and they looked authentic. The character sprites had to be drawn from scratch, because Mario's SNES sprites would not fit the Genesis palette or the borrowed engine's animation frames — and drawing them was the one place the bootleggers had to actually produce something, which is exactly where the cartridge visibly falls apart.
Bootlegs like this are the reason large parts of the world's childhood gaming memories do not match any official release history. In markets where neither Nintendo nor Sega maintained a real distribution presence, the console you owned and the games you played were determined by what the local market could source and modify — and a Genesis with a Mario cartridge in it was not a contradiction, it was Tuesday.
The bootleg is also a small monument to Nintendo's brand power. Nobody hacked Squirrel King to insert a different squirrel. The entire value of the exercise came from the two characters the pirates could not legally have, and were therefore prepared to build a whole cartridge around stealing.