As one of the most well known ROM hacks, Cory Arcangel describes Super Mario Clouds (2003) as “an old Mario Brothers cartridge which I modified to erase everything but the clouds.” But, in the tradition of Magritte’s paintings and Warhol’s screenprints, that is not a pipe, that is not soup, and this is not Super Mario Bros. Arcangel’s artwork does not contain any source code from the PRG ROM driving Nintendo’s original game. Following Archangel’s open source instructions and the ROM hacking community’s documentation produces a different game altogether: Coin Heaven (2013). In Coin Heaven an invisible Mario walks on invisible ground, looping endlessly in a cloudscape where a cinematic sequence once took place between World 1-1 and World 1-2 of Super Mario Bros. Beyond the speed, and the pattern of the clouds, the colors, and greater degree of repetition, something is very different. A lone coin remains blinking in the menu. All that is solid does not melt into air this Coin Heaven resists a formal autonomy between games, art, and capital by first engaging the practical problems of hacking hardware then acknowledging the desire for a type of utopia in which these practices operate without material base. Through a discussion of Super Mario Clouds and Coin Heaven, this talk offers an example of how close reading becomes platform study and how the logic of the market infects its own critique.
