Mario Teaches Typing
by SanityCrypto
Math Blaster, Mavis Beacon, Number Munchers, etc… Was edutainment a dirty word for you growing up? It certainly was to many through the 80’s and 90’s as numerous ham-fisted attempts at making educationally focused video games produced joyless slogs our teachers and parents gleefully pressured us to play. We did have some gems that did happen to have great entertainment value while still being accepted on school computers. Of course, there were appreciated titles like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, The Castle of Dr. Brain, and The Oregon Trail, but for me, our beloved plumber in red overalls was exactly the draw I needed to jump headfirst into Mario Teaches Typing.
The publisher, Interplay, brought us Mario Teaches Typing in 1992 for MS-DOS, and two years later was released on CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh, allowing practically everyone with a home computer to join in on the “fun”.
Interplay also made a sequel in 1996, Mario Teaches Typing 2 which I personally didn’t know about until much later in life, and I may need to do a follow-up review on that one as I take a dive into the past and give that a whirl, for science!
Fun Facts
[Mario Teaches Typing was the first time Mario actually had a voice, and the MS-DOS version was voiced by a gentleman named Ronald B. Ruben, but the iconic floating head Mario from the CD-ROM version was voiced by the amazing Charles Martinet, who went on to be the voice of Mario in every game since then. Martinet is also the voices of Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, Baby Mario, Baby Luigi, Baby Wario, and many other Mario universe characters. Martinet’s IMDB credits are quite impressive, even aside from the Mario characters.]
The game starts off by having you make a profile for yourself and choosing your “teacher”, which is Mario, Luigi, or Princess Peach. There is no difference in who you pick as your character/teacher, and is just for who you want to have as the protagonist for the deeply cerebral storyline.
In the first level, your character is running along the iconic brick floor with blue skies in the background, koopas and floating bricks marked with singular keys that you have to hit in time to successfully steamroller the koopa (they don’t actually jump on them) or hit the block above. It starts off very basically with two home row keys on one side of the keyboard in alternation to learn their placement, then it shifts to two others, then alternating one key per hand and so on.
Each lesson goes for two minutes and gives you your stats of keys typed, errors, words per minute, and accuracy percentage. I surprisingly found this to be way more challenging than being tasked with full words in later levels.
It goes on to give you more challenging sequences and does a good job of teaching key placement and to suggest the proper finger for each stroke.
The second level has your character in the classic Mario aquatic setting, swimming away from a couple of different baddies while you are given full yet short words in repetition with slight variances like single-letter differences or capitalization. This level also utilizes the space bar which moves you away from pecking and more into actual typing.
The third level puts you into the dungeon setting of the Mario universe, with you standing ready to run under 3 patiently waiting Thwomps ready to drop. This round gives you full-length sentences, which of course, are educationally based. Facts about the Declaration of Independence and the civil war were what it started me with, and you only progress past one Thwomp per every sentence or two completed. After all three Thwomps, your character then wades through a pool of quicksand while you are typing. You then repeat both back and forth until your time for that lesson is up.
There is a mode of practice that is kind of like an endless mode for drilling keys that is more generic in design and doesn’t have the game-related element to it, but it actually seems to still come off as a decent challenge so it doesn’t completely feel out of context or unfun.
I couldn’t help but notice that the game did have you double space after each full sentence, which I have recently found out that they no longer teach that practice and is actually a decent topic of debate. I’m double space for life! I did however notice that they do not use an Oxford comma, which I am an absolute firm believer in.
All in all, we have seen some very clever ways to integrate education into games, with some that almost trick you into using scholastic skills and lessons, but I think that this “game” used a hugely popular character and theme to draw kids (and maybe adults) into a pretty generic educational program, and I personally think they did a pretty decent job of using the facade to keep you going. Most type training programs felt monotonous and laborious, so I felt that this was one that really hit the mark amazingly for its time. It honestly still stands up enough today as I was having fun with the visual stimuli as I tried to beat my previous WPM score or finish the lesson with fewer errors. It was a tad humbling to see my scores vs how efficient I assumed I was going in.
This article isn’t the end for me and Mario Teaches Typing, as I did have fun while diving back into this, even aside from the nostalgic connection I had with it. I wouldn’t mind being more efficient with typing seeing that almost all of us do it daily, and I think Mario Teaches Typing 2 is a decent next step for me.
(That artwork though!)
Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more:
