Mario Teaches Typing
The 1992 typing tutor that put Mario in the computer lab: type the letter on the block to smash it, type the word to outswim the fish, type the sentence to outrun the Thwomps. Interplay built it to be the kids' Mavis Beacon, it sold more than 800,000 copies, and its 1993 CD-ROM version was the first time Charles Martinet's Mario voice appeared in a game, on a giant floating head that scared half its students.
Brian Fargo, who ran Interplay Productions, knew Les Crane, the media personality behind the 1987 hit Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and had heard that most copies were bought by parents wanting their children to type. He figured Mario would make a better teacher for kids. Interplay's vice president Richard Lehrberg had a working relationship with Nintendo, which was exploring educational software to answer 1980s complaints that games were bad for children, and Nintendo agreed to lend the character; Shigeru Miyamoto was not involved. Thomas Decker produced and designed the game, which reuses music from Super Mario World. Interplay showed it at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1992 and it was in stores the next month, on floppy disk for MS-DOS, with a Macintosh version from MacPlay in 1993.
The lessons mimic the side-scrollers. In "Mario's Smash & Dash" you type single letters to break blocks and stomp Koopa Troopas; in "Mario's Wet Word Challenge" you type words to keep Mario, Luigi or Princess Peach swimming ahead of the sea creatures; in "Mario's Tunnel of Doom" you type whole sentences to escape falling Thwomps and quicksand in an underground castle. A status bar tracks words per minute and errors and highlights which finger to use, and hitting a goal earns a printable certificate. Ronald B. Ruben voiced Mario, the first time the character had spoken in a game.
The enhanced CD-ROM, in stores by November 1993, added "Mario-In-Real-Time": full-motion video of a 3D Mario head, driven by SimGraphics' VActor motion-capture system, the same technology behind the Nintendo trade-show demos that Charles Martinet had been voicing since 1990. Martinet performed the head himself and pushed back on its scolding. Where the script said "Oh that wasn't very good, try again," he suggested "Not as good this time, but you're gonna do it better this time, let's go!", reasoning that Mario would never be in a negative mindset. He later called it one of his most important Mario projects, and he went on to voice the character for the next three decades. Reviewers were less charmed by the head: one called its Italian accent "ridiculous," and a 2021 NPR retrospective called the floating head "creepy."
Mario Teaches Typing sat in educational-software top-ten charts from 1992 to 1996 and sold more than 800,000 copies, enough that Crane reportedly complained to Fargo about the competition. Mario Teaches Typing 2, from Interplay's Brainstorm division in 1997, added an on-screen color-coded keyboard and reviewed worse. Reviewers were never sure it taught typing well, and one recalled advancing by "frantically [mashing] the keyboard," which is also how most of us remember it.
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