5 Years, 474 Hours, $348,161 Raised Playing Mario…

It seems a little crazy that it’s already over for another year, but just as equally impressive when you look at the stats like that cumulatively since the Mario Marathon gang first started playing back in 2008! Hopefully it’s mostly just hyperbole due to mass sleep deprivation when the jokes inevitably start to fly about maybe doing it again the next year, though, because even though I didn’t really tune in this year quite as much as I had planned on doing after last year’s event, it’s getting to the point where I think it might be kind of weird not to watch these guys take on days upon days of Mario mania past and present as June rolls around each summer…

The last couple of weeks have been kind of insane for reasons not yet revealed, but as the weekend progressed I tried to at least keep the Marathon on at time in the background, even going s0 far as to put the Twitch.tv app on my phone and listen along in the final hours last night when I went out to walk the dog to make sure that I didn’t miss anything! As I read back through some old blog posts from previous years, I realized that I didn’t actually get the chance to kick back, pull up a controller, and enjoy some of the games for myself alongside the show this year … maybe next time … but in the same vein of wanting to do more when (hopefully!) Mario Marathon 6 rolls around in 2013, I’ve been trying to come up with some other ways to get involved simply past donating more, and I think I may have stumbled onto something.

I want to make a Lego mosaic of Mario, and then see if they want to give it away as a contest prize sometime during the marathon.

I wrote a few months ago about an interest in making a mosaic after stumbling upon a Kickstarter (that eventually failed) for someone trying to do a mural of the entire 1-1 level of Super Mario Bros.! Now I certainly have no desire to do that much, namely because $15 grand worth of bricks (and 90 feet of wall space) might be a little hard to come by … but something I could fit on one or two base boards with a few hundred bricks? Granted, I haven’t yet done one myself, but I’ve done some research on the how and the how much, and that’s definitely doable.

It helps that the 8-bit style of Nintendo games is pretty simple to re-create with basic blocks … there were actually a handful of photos submitted by viewers as Fan Art where they made images from Mario games out of those beads that you arrange on a board and then fuse together with the iron and those looked pretty neat. It’s basically the same concept – I’d just like to make something a little bit bigger that might look nice enough framed that someone would consider hanging on their wall.

I actually already have the mapping figured out for a simple 1-panel version of Mario (non-Super version) – I just haven’t ordered any of the bricks yet – so maybe I’ll give that a try later on this summer and then we’ll see where it goes from there. I just think it might be a neat way to participate if I can come up with something that people like, and people tend to like Legos, so it seemed like it might be a cool fit amongst some of the other prizes that other fans donated this year!

Besides, I can’t for the life of me seem to win or buy one of their awesome t-shirts, so maybe if I donate something cool I’d have a better chance at snagging one??? 😉

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