Some people have a lot of time on their hands and some people use it to make some very complex structures in life. Sometimes those complex structures happen to be main menu screens based on popular video games... like Super Mario Bros.
B.B. Korry completely rebuilt the main starting screen for the 1985 NES rendition of the Super Mario Bros.... using toothpicks. You can see how he plotted it all out in the video below. However, it's all in Japanese, so you'll have to do a bit of guesswork to figure out what's going on.
Gamespot caught wind of the story and put up a piece detailing how B.B., Korry structured and designed the art piece using a somewhat complex method.
Korry starts with an XML spreadsheet and proceeds to map out the blocks where the title logo will go, the text and the little Mario design. He uses the XML to plot out how many toothpicks will be used for each section. It all sums up to 14,336 toothpicks used to build a very interesting main screen based on Mario.
He used more than 7,000 blue toothpicks for the sky, 2,354 toothpicks for the backplate for the text and only 20 toothpicks for Mario's red jumpsuit.
As the video shows, Korry went through the painstaking task of painting each toothpick for the smaller parts, but he proceeds to use spray paint across a large swathe of toothpicks for the larger areas like the sky and shadows.
He then uses graph paper to align the toothpicks so they're in the proper order and adjacent with the right amount of indentation. There's a lot of measuring going on here because he wants the words and certain parts to stick out.
As the video showcases, the entire thing was designed in parts and then assembled separately. There's even a bit of a special little surprise at the end.
Even though the old 1985 rendition of Super Mario Bros is old and dated, it's still big enough to keep and maintain a strong enough following that gamers are willing to take time out of their lives to build a 14,000 piece toothpick sculpture of the main menu. It takes a certain level of unfettered dedication to even think to pull off something like that. The added fact that the precision and math involved with doing it properly is another hurdle that seems crazy to overcome just for the sake of showing it off to complete strangers on YouTube.
Anyway, Mario has been a busy boy, with his latest outing being the new Mario Party. I do wonder if Nintendo took note of Korry's real life sculpture of the iconic plumber and if they plan on acknowledging it anytime soon? Well, if for nothing else at least Korry managed to spark some discussion about his project across social media and some gaming websites.
