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Super Mario Land, still to this day, is one of my favourite Game Boy titles. In fact, I believe it was the first game I ever played on my older brother's Game Boy Pocket.
Among other things, I loved that the game had a completely different musical identity to the mainline NES Mario games (a result of it being composed by Hirokazu "Chip" Tanaka instead of the mainline Mario composer Koji Kondo), and also appreciated that the game had you travelling to a different land, resulting in some stranger enemies and locations that you wouldn't expect to see from the Mushroom Kingdom.
Being familiar with the original games from the Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, it felt like a real departure from the rest of the series, but still just as charming and replayable,
With that helpful bit of context out of the way, I'm always over the moon to see fan projects for this slightly more offbeat Mario entry, with the latest endeavour to cross my radar being Super Mario Land 1 + ½ from the artist 2bitcrook, and a group of collaborators including TeachEric & Shin (programming), and Beatscribe (music).
Developed in GB Studio, with the help of Mico27's Metatile Plugin, this is a short but sweet 1-level demo for Game Boy Color and Game Boy emulators that asks: "What if Super Mario Land Came Out Much Later?"
In other words, what if the 1989 title looked more like its sequel, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, released three years later, "when the devs had more experience with the Game Boy hardware."
Labelled a "proof-of-concept", it features a recreation of the first level of the game with larger and more expressive sprites for Mario, Princess Daisy, and enemies like Goombos and Bombshell Koopas.
According to 2BitCrook, it was "designed with original Game Boy limitations in mind (sprite and background limitations)" but runs "in Game Boy Colour mode to make use of the double CPU.
It's something I know I'd love to see expanded in the future, with the creator stating on itch that the original intention was "to do the entire first world" before ideas for other projects got in the way.
Given the demo involves Nintendo IP, it is available for free, with the developers telling fans, "If you paid money for this, you were ripped off." You can download it here to give it a try.