Mari0
Overview
Mari0 is a free, open-source platformer from Stabyourself.net that rebuilds Super Mario Bros. from scratch and hands Mario a Portal gun. The two portal colours let you warp across a level, fall with extra speed, redirect your own momentum and reach places a normal jump never could — and up to four players can do it at once, each with their own portal gun.
Key Features
- Faithful Super Mario Bros. recreation — the original game’s levels rebuilt from scratch in Lua and tuned to imitate the feel of the 1985 NES classic.
- Portal gun — fire a blue and an orange portal to travel instantly across a stage, carry momentum through them and shortcut whole sections of a level.
- 4-player simultaneous co-op — four players share one screen and one keyboard, each with an independent portal pair and their own HUD row.
- Portal gadgets — light bridges, buttons, cubes and cube dispensers, faith plates, gels, emancipation grills and laser detectors, all interacting with the platforming physics.
- Built-in level editor — the same editor the developers used to build the game’s own levels, with tile, entity, background and region tools.
- Downloadable mappacks — an in-game browser for community campaigns and mods, including a full Portal tribute campaign.
- 33 hats and game modifiers — cosmetic unlocks plus modifiers that change the rules for extra challenge or silliness.
- Tiny and portable — a few megabytes on the LÖVE framework, so it runs comfortably on modest and ageing hardware.
Why Use Mari0?
It takes a game everyone already knows and makes it new again: Super Mario Bros. with portals is a genuinely different puzzle platformer rather than a reskin. It is completely free with no ads, no in-app purchases, no account and no DRM, it ships with the very editor used to build it, and it supports four-player local co-op on a single machine — the kind of feature usually locked behind a paid multiplayer game. There is no installer and no launcher: unpack the download and run it.
Use Cases
- Local co-op sessions — four players, one screen, fresh chaos every round.
- Replaying Super Mario Bros. with a puzzle mechanic instead of memorised routes.
- Building and sharing custom levels and full mappack campaigns with the bundled editor.
- Playing a classic platformer natively on Linux or a modern machine without an emulator.
Platforms
Windows, macOS and Linux — official builds for all three, distributed as a small zip. Written in Lua on the LÖVE framework, so it also runs anywhere LÖVE 11.4 is available.
Licence
Free and open source — the source code is released under the MIT licence by Maurice Guégan (Stabyourself.net). As an unofficial fan game it borrows its characters and level art from Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. and Valve’s Portal, so the MIT licence covers the code rather than those referenced assets.
Similar Tools
- SuperTux — free and open source, a side-scrolling platformer with its own level editor and a similar pick-up-and-play feel.