Marcel Winatschek

Wrong Warp Zone

Our beloved fat plumber steps into a warp zone and ends up somewhere he absolutely cannot handle: a real city. It goes about as well as you’d expect, and it ends with a tremendous explosion, because of course it does.

I’ve been on a video game nostalgia kick lately and this landed perfectly in the middle of it—the joke works because Mario’s world has its own internal logic so complete that anything outside it reads as hostile territory. Concrete, traffic, people who don’t drop coins when you hit them. He never stood a chance.