Remember the Super Mario Maker craze, when a bunch of masochistic platforming-obsessed players would show off their near-impossible levels? And then, just days later, some even more masochistic platforming-obsessed player would post a video of themselves beating it?
Well, now you can relive those glory days with this incredible combination of Super Mario and Celeste, released as its own game and dubbed the "lovechild of two incredible platformers" by its creator, MarkAlarm. Imagine Mario, but he can dash, wall-jump, and overcome an anxiety disorder. It's what we've always wanted!
The game was released to celebrate Celeste's fourth birthday, a milestone that Maddy Thorson, the director, wrote about, detailing the strangeness of associating the game's age with so many important things in her life that have happened before and since.
Here's the trailer for Celeste.smc:
"The hack is not meant to be a 1:1 recreation of Celeste, but more of a blend between it and Super Mario World. It combines standard kaizo mechanics with physics and design philosophies from Celeste, while still feeling like a Mario hack. Heavy inspiration is obviously taken from Celeste, though a lot of the hack includes my own design style which I found best combined the mechanics from the two games."
-MarkAlarm
The hack took MarkAlarm "easily over 1,000 hours" and involved 22,000 lines of handwritten assembly code. MarkAlarm notes that it can be "rough on the hands", especially with an actual SNES controller. You can download the hack here.
Comments (24)
omg hacks bad Nintendo sue plz
Jokes aside, stuff like this always amazes me. People who make this stuff are so talented!
i get a feeling most people who beat all of celeste legit can do kaizo stuff, but man, not touching this with a forty foot pole
Celeste by itself already gave me painful hand cramps so I think I'll pass on this mod lol.
I beat Celeste once, never going back again. Not that it's bad( quite good actually), it's just that I value my sanity.
4 years? Would be a good time for a fat sale so I could pick it up at a price I won't mind forfeiting if it's too hard...right...right?! Guess not then.
If people ever wonder why Nintendo never hired a fan to make levels for them on their 2D Super Mario games, this is why. You just never had that level where you could take a breathe, relax, and just explore. They just had to keep pushing you and pushing you and pushing you and I hate those kind of levels. It's like an endless runner game except you're not endlessly running but is force to.
@Specter_of-the_OLED depends on the hack, honestly. mario hacks aren't nearly as bad about all being much harder than the main game as say, super metroid or LTTP ones (or even megaman for that matter, yeesh), but you can also blame that on there being a much larger sample size
a lot of people just want to make a good level/experience and not just a challenge mod!
@Specter_of-the_OLED I mean, this hack is definitely not on that level of constant go-go-go. For the most part, it's very similar to Celeste, alternating section of constant movement and safe break locations.
Admittedly, it starts in difficulty closer to around Chapter 5 or so, rather than Chapter 1, but that's to be expected when it's aimed at people who've beaten Celeste.
I feel like every week a news article comes out to remind me of a great game I haven’t played yet, and I really need to play Celeste.
This looks amazing! I love Celeste and will definitely give this a try but it looks super hard.
This is actually pretty cool. But I am not playing it due to not liking super hard games.
Side note: look if you need to automatically disable comments on a article so people don’t fight over a controversial topic then maybe just don’t post the article. I know this has nothing to do with this one but I wanted to put my thoughts out on it.
Interesting but not my cup of tea. I got through a good chunk of Celeste but ultimately put it down and never went back. Got bored. It's a well-designed game, it's plenty challenging but not oppressively so, I dunno, just lost my interest and fell off 🤷♂️
I'm interested in this hack, and even more interested in Celeste, but the game has yet to appear as a physical retail copy in the country of its birth... the same goes for The Messenger, come to think of it. I don't know how much influence Thorson might have over a physical release, but I will note that Stardew Valley showed up at retail quite late into the Switch's life. Here's hoping!
@CANOEberry
Celeste is so deserving of a general retail release, but only had a Limited Run release here in the States. I was lucky enough to watch for it, and then wait wait wait for my preorder to arrive before I finally got to play Celeste.
I sincerely hope there is some kind of reissue for it!
@KateGray
Thank you for linking to Maddy Thorson’s blog post! It was an intensely interesting read for me, as someone who started her gender transition not long before Maddy did.
I don’t use social media and never would have seen her post otherwise.
Celeste is unforgettable for me, even if it took nearly all I had to clear the base game on normal mode. And that was before Kate broke the news to me that Celeste was canon trans!
Someday I’ll recover enough to play the Farewell DLC.
Happy 4th Birthday to an amazing game!
@UglyCasanova Despite what you may hear, the main game isn't that hard, or long for that matter. It only really gets tough when you get to the post game. Not to say the game is easy or anything but it's something I could beat when I was 10 with enough practice
@blindsquarel
1. Celeste isn't that hard once you get used to it. There is plenty of challenge in the game but its not unforgiving, the game doesn't punish you in any way for dying
2. They turn off comments on anything related to covid, which is understandable. I don't think something like that shouldn't get posted because the actual opinion in the article isn't contraversial, its just the general topic
@Specter_of-the_OLED They didn't hire fans, but fans pay them to make levels. I mean that's pretty much just mario maker 2 right? I mean i know mario maker is more limited than what you can do with a rom hack or a new game, but it's still easier than going out and hiring someone
@OnlyItsMeReid
I just don’t think it belongs on the site. Thus is a Nintendo fan site not the news. That is not Nintendo news or even gaming related. That is all I will say on it. Again the message isn’t the problem it’s the place it was posted that is the problem.
I'm not usually into this kind of stuff, but this looks amazing.
This reminded me that there was a guy who tried for months to beat a Super Mario Maker level before they stopped accepting new uploads. What happened to that? I can’t find the article on it now.
Celeste is, like, one of the handful genuine games of the decade of the 2010s, certainly to me at least. And hell, I didn't even connect with the apparent trans story message running in the background. I had run through the whole game 100% and the Farewell DLC before I connected the dots and had a legitimate "knocked off your feat and go "Oh"" moment of realization on what I overlooked. Hell I thought Madeline was climbing the mountain as a sort of self-repentance over some petty crime she holds herself dearly responsible over, because I am the big dumb.
It is just such a wonderfully done platformer with the perfect level of challenge, level design, atmosphere and an unfairly godly soundtrack. So it's great to see fan games like this with this much time and devotion put into them.
@Teksetter you're welcome! It's a great read. 😊
Looks very good, but also insane! I wonder if they will ever make a Celeste 2. After all there is a semi-sequel on Pico, with a grapple mechanic.
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