Book Review: Super Mario Bros. 3: Brick By Brick by Bob Chipman

Super Mario Bros. 3: Brick By Brick, relates how Bob Chipman recently played the classic video game. It does not, however, explain why.
Granted, I know why he’d play Mario 3—it’s a great game, which Chipman calls his all-time favorite. But even he seems unsure why he chose to write a book about the experience, other than to say he wrote a book. For a writer this sort of experiment is its own reward, and the attempt is its own story. That satisfaction, though, doesn’t necessarily reach the reader. The market for this project cannot help but ask “Why should I read about someone playing a game when I could just play it myself?” Brick By Brick fails to answer this question.
Frankly, my purchase of the book had more to do with curiosity about the author than with the topic or format. Chipman is the prolific vlogger behind two franchises: “MovieBob" reviewing films for the Escapist, and "The Game OverThinker" presenting deliberately ponderous commentary on the video game industry and culture. It’s the OverThinker stuff I find particularly fascinating, a testament to the self-important excess frequently associated with what Chipman calls "E-Celebrity."
That Chipman is internet famous is not particularly relevant to Brick By Brick, so it’s telling that he has to explain how it happened anyway. That pompous vanity—the conviction that he is the hero of his own story—seeps into everything Bob produces. Upon achieving even a modicum of fame, he saw the chance to use his vlogs as a bully pulpit to promote his agenda for gaming, which is also evident in the histories of the Super Mario character in Brick By Brick. And yes, I said histories, plural. The book contains an account of Mario’s rise in popular culture, followed by the same information retold in a more autobiographical “Mario and Me” style. Only the latter account is necessary, since Chipman invariably ties Mario’s ups and downs with his own enthusiasm and disillusionment for video games.

[Above: Bob Chipman (left) and his brother Chris shoot an action sequence for “The Game OverThinker”]
For Bob, Mario is a symbol of all that is “right” with video games, locked in a struggle against all that is “wrong.” That fits into his extremely Manichaean view of everything: good vs. evil, liberals vs. conservatives, nerds vs. jocks, ’80s Japanese gaming vs. Call of Duty. There’s no middle ground—you’re either with Nintendo’s unassuming hero or you’re part of the endless horde of turtles he will inevitably defeat. Chipman doesn’t simply admire Mario, he’d like nothing so much as to be Mario—by now his “Adventures of the Game OverThinker” webseries is a thinly-veiled plea for someone to make a video game about him saving the gamer culture from things he doesn’t like.
So I was drawn to Brick By Brick as a perfect storm of Chipman’s ego, and in that respect the book does not disappoint. It’s 208 pages of pure OverThinker, bloviating to the point of self-parody about the significance of a 23-year-old game and the fact that he has played it. (“Mario is still here. So am I. I’d like to think that – if possible – we would thank one another for that.”) His would-be peers, James Rolfe and Ben Croshaw, are name-dropped a total of seven times. After introducing both himself and his in-game avatar, Chipman devotes twenty pages to listing every character, enemy, item, and type of platform found in Super Mario Bros. 3, a convenience that his audience could not possibly need. The raison d’être for this book, the unprecedented shot-by-shot analysis of a single video game, does not actually start until page 85.
Bob’s premise is to blend his gameplay narrative with events that occurred in his personal life while he was working on the project. That’s a tall order, and I give him credit for trying, but it just doesn’t work. His journal entries feel entirely removed from the Mushroom Kingdom, save for the occasional note about being too preoccupied to work on the book. The closest thing to a theme—that Bob is playing Mario 3 for the last time in his childhood home while he searches for a new apartment—is barely mentioned. Since the game analysis can’t connect with the human touch in the journal segments, it has to stand on its own as a long, dry list of stuff that happened. I entered this stage, I went down this pipe, I found this many 1-ups, I got killed by a Hammer Brother. It turns out that Super Mario Bros. 3 is fun but not particularly interesting.
Chipman tries to hold the reader’s interest by peppering his book with trivia (the Koopalings are named after famous people, Bob-Omb is the only remnant from Mario 2, the Warp Whistle plays a tune from The Legend of Zelda, etc.) but a lot of it is stuff I already knew. The problem is that I grew up reading the same books and interviews about Mario that Chipman did. I went to see The Wizard, I thought the NBC cartoon was a big deal, and I grumbled at Yoshi’s Island for “changing” Mario continuity. So did my brothers. So did a lot of kids back then. Mario was kind of a big deal at the time, and Bob’s fascination with the franchise is hardly unique.
For Brick By Brick the challenge is to recognize that the only audience for the book consists of fans as knowledgeable about the subject as the author, and to present a new perspective on that subject. Chipman not only fails to do this, but fails to see the need. For him getting a book published is an end unto itself, and his take on Super Mario is essential because he would like to think it so. It doesn’t matter that he has nothing to say that’s new to Mario fans or relevant to non-fans. Chipman expresses a hope that his book will be appreciated by future generations, but it seems suited only for appreciation by himself, of himself, and for himself.
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