Mario's Battle Royale Lives Again

The surprise battle royale-style game "Mario Bros. 35" was a bit of an oddity when it was released for the icon's 35th anniversary. Even so, fans on Reddit were still sorry to see it go when Nintendo pulled the plug on the game. However, one Mario devotee decided to take matters into their own hands by reverse-engineering the Nintendo servers to reactivate the game, making it playable once again.

GitHub user Kinnay has posted a patch that redirects the game to a new open source server for the game. This means that dedicated "Mario Bros. 35" fans now have a chance to revisit the battle royale for the first time since Nintendo took the game down to make room for "Pac-Man 99" on March 31, 2021.

Of course, since this unofficial server doesn't have Nintendo promoting it, gamers might find it difficult to find opponents to truly experience the battle royale craziness that "Mario Bros. 35" was meant to highlight. Checking the server dashboard linked from the GitHub page at press time reveals few to zero connected users, so gamers may not be able to easily drop in like they could when the game was live before. However, the game is at least accessible — unless Nintendo decides to step in once again.

The fact that the game is back at all will be exciting to plenty of "Mario Bros." fans, some of whom have shared their efforts to try and recreate the "Mario Bros. 35" experience using "Mario Maker 2" on Reddit. However, Nintendo is fiercely protective of its signature franchise, which may mean that Kinnay's revival of the game may not be long for this world.

For instance, as reported by Bleeding Cool, a previous unofficial battle royale game called "Mario Royale" promptly received a cease and desist letter from Nintendo when it went live in 2019. That sort of response may be headed towards this new server, especially once Nintendo's lawyers get wind of the new workaround.

Then again, unlike "Mario Royale," the revival of "Mario Bros. 35" isn't a new product developed by a fan using Nintendo's biggest character, but simply a patch created to reactivate a product the company designed itself. In fact, looking at Kinnay's GitHub profile reveals plenty of previous work on Nintendo-related projects, all of which are still up and accessible.

As such, it looks like "Mario Bros. 35" fans have at least one more chance to play the hectic reinterpretation of the classic game, but they should probably move fast to take advantage of it.