The whole Super Mario Bros game fits in 40 kilobytes. The selfie on your phone is bigger than that. Nintendo had so little memory to work with that five of the levels you played as a kid are exact copies of earlier ones.
World 5-3 is World 1-3 with a few Bullet Bills flying in from off-screen. World 5-4 is World 2-4 with every fire bar turned on at once. Worlds 6-4, 7-2, and 7-3 also reuse old level data. Same map, different paint job.
In 1985, Miyamoto’s team had 32 kilobytes for the game’s code and 8 for the graphics. About one phone photo’s worth of space, total, to hold the entire game including physics, music, art, and 32 levels. So they wrote each level as a recipe. “Place a pipe here. Stack twelve bricks here. Drop a Goomba at this spot.” The game cooked the level live as Mario walked through it. When the cartridge ran low on space, the team pointed to an old recipe and dropped new enemies on top.
The two screenshots in the source tweet look like cousins for the same reason. Miyamoto built every Mario level from the same tiny pile of building blocks. Start with the brick staircase that ends most stages, the pyramid stack of question blocks, the pipes that always rise from a shared baseline, and the rule that Mario can only jump four blocks high. That last one sets every platform’s height across all 32 levels. Move those pieces around and the player feels like they are somewhere new, even though they have seen the parts a hundred times.
That is what makes 8-1 and 8-3 feel like the same world wearing different clothes. The 8-1 staircase is a solid wall of bricks. The 8-3 version is the same staircase shape, but built out of floating coin blocks with empty sky between them. Same outline. Completely different game.
This was Nintendo trying to save space. It accidentally became one of the most copied design tricks in video game history. Forty years and 40 million copies later, the game still teaches designers a single lesson. Build a small box of pieces well, and the player will think the box is endless.
How did i not notice this until my 40s....