How Malta levelled up with Mario: 40 years of plumber-powered nostalgia

It’s-a-him, Malta: 40 years of Mario and the island that never stopped jumping

Valletta’s evening air was thick with nostalgia last Friday as the capital’s biggest gaming café, Glitch, projected a pixel-perfect speed-run of Super Mario Bros. on the façade of the old Embassy Theatre. Passers-by—grandparents clutching pastizzi, teenagers in Fortnite hoodies, tourists fresh off the cruise ships—paused to watch a plumber in red overalls hop over Goombas born the same year Malta ditched the lira for the euro. The impromptu screening, organised by the University of Malta’s Gaming Research Lab, marked four decades since Shigeru Miyamoto’s creation first bounced onto Nintendo’s Famicom on 8 September 1985. In Malta, the anniversary feels less like foreign nostalgia and more like a communal birthday: almost every Maltese household of a certain vintage still has a yellowing NES cartridge or a battered Game Boy in a drawer somewhere.

“Mario taught us English before we ever set foot in a classroom,” laughs 34-year-old game designer Rebecca Cassar, sipping a Kinnie at the Strand kiosk in Sliema. Cassar, whose indie studio MoltenBits is currently prototyping a Maltese-language platformer called “Ġuġa’s Quest”, credits the Italian plumber with kick-starting the local dev scene. “We didn’t have pocket money for cartridges, so we swapped them like footy stickers outside church after Ħadd il-Fidwa. You learned ‘Game Over’, ‘Continue’, ‘Time Up’—the grammar of defeat and retry.”

That linguistic legacy is measurable. A 2022 study by the university’s linguistics department found that 68 % of Maltese gamers aged 25-45 first encountered English verbs such as “jump”, “run” and “save” through Mario titles. Lecturer Dr Mario (yes, really) Spiteri argues the franchise quietly shaped Malta’s bilingual identity. “While politicians argued over whether English was ‘il-lingwa tal-imperjalisti’, kids were absorbing it via 8-bit mushrooms. Mario was our first English teacher in overalls.”

Retailers remember the rush. “We queued outside Melita Toys in 1991 for Super Mario World,” recalls Raymond “Il-Ġermiz” Borg, now 42 and manager of GameZone in Birkirkara. “They had only 25 SNES consoles. My dad bribed the shop assistant with a box of Żeppi’s nougat to hold one. Cost him 249 liri—half a month’s wage.” Borg still displays that grey-and-purple console in his shop window, price tag faded but intact. “Customers pose with it for Instagram; it’s basically a relic.”

The Maltese arcade scene of the early 90s centred on one smoky room: the Playland in Buġibba, opposite the old aquarium. Teenagers fed 25c coins into bootleg “Super Mario Bros. 3” cabinets while Brits on pub crawls belted out “Wonderwall” next door. When Playland closed in 2004 to make way for a karaoke bar, its two remaining Mario cabs were rescued by the NGO Friends of Retro Malta. They now rotate between village festa bumper-car tents, drawing queues of thirty-somethings keen to show their kids what “real games” looked like.

Local speed-running has exploded since 2018, when Maltese runner “MushroomKing” (real name: Luke Pace, 24, from Żejtun) cracked the top-20 worldwide leaderboard for Super Mario 64. Pace streams at 3 a.m. to catch U.S. audiences, monetising via TikTok clips soundtracked by techno versions of “Gozo’s Got Talent” auditions. “Chat don’t care where Malta is until I drop a pastizz emoji,” he grins. Revenue from subs paid for his sister’s first year at MCAST. “Mario literally put me through college.”

Even the church has blessed the plumber. In 2017, Fr David Muscat, parish priest of St George’s in Qormi, included a Mario sound-effect medley during the youth pageant of Palm Sunday. “The theme is innocence and resurrection,” he explained. “Mario dies, respawns, dies again—cheap theology, but teenagers get it.” YouTube clips of kids in Goomba costumes shuffling down Triq San Ġorġ racked up 1.3 million views.

Nintendo itself has never officially staged a launch event in Malta; the market is “too micro,” distributors say. Yet grey-import Switch consoles sell out faster than pastizzi at 6 a.m., and every village fireworks factory has at least one carpenter who’s carved a Mario star for the festa finale. This summer, Xewkija’s pyro crew sent up a 12-metre firework shaped like a Super Mushroom; the boom rattled windows in Comino.

As the Valletta projection ended with the iconic 1-up jingle, an elderly woman turned to her grandson. “Kien qed jaħdem fix-xogħolijiet tal-ħamrija, ħalli jitla’ l-ewwel livell,” she chuckled—“He worked the construction jobs to reach level one.” The kid rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. Somewhere between the pastizzi crumbs and the flickering pixels, Malta had once again levelled up together.