Do The Mario

There’s something strange about how Mario became the thing that defined video games—just a little guy in red, no story, no character beyond the movement. The design’s so clean it barely registers as design, just a figure that responds exactly the way you want, a jump that lands when you think it should land. I spend a lot of time thinking about how things feel to control, how that immediate feedback between your hand and the screen is almost the entire point. Maybe that’s why it stuck around when everything else got complicated and forgot what made it fun in the first place.