On March 22, 2012, a then-unknown Tumblr blog posted a series of innocuous images from Paper Mario . Over the next six years, it would share thousands of images, facts, sprites, and other obscure minutia from the world of Mario, ranging from fascinating to downright creepy . Described as a “Super Mario variety blog,” Supper Mario Broth has an enormous following on both Tumblr and Twitter , where it thrives in 2018’s world of memes and ironic shitposting.

“You can call me just Broth, for the purposes of this conversation,” said the voice on the other end of the Skype line.

“We now know about a creative decision that Nintendo made and ultimately abandoned during one of the most influential video games of all time,” said Cifaldi. “That just doesn't happen without something like Supper Mario Broth examining every possible angle in this game, and I love them for it.”

One of Cifaldi’s favorite posts has to do with a single piece of geometry. In the shipping version of Super Mario 64, during a stage where Mario is sliding, a YouTube creator discovered an invisible wall right above an upcoming turn . The creator hypothesized Nintendo had, at one point, meant to put a left-turn sign in the game. After careful research, Broth managed to discover early gameplay footage from the game that proved him right.

“You'd think everyone has said all there is to say about Super Mario Bros. by now,” said video game historian and founder of the archival-focused Video Game History Foundation Frank Cifaldi. “Broth proves that if you dig deep into ephemera and data-mine the games themselves, you can find all kinds of new and interesting talking points.”

“[long pause] The people that I could turn to normally in real-life at all had their own difficulties,” said the blog’s author, who asked to be addressed as Broth, out of respect for his privacy. “Normally, I do not try to trouble my readers. I know that people come to Supper Mario Broth just to see some Mario facts. They do not come here to listen to my problems.”

Patreons typically supplement someone’s hobby to make it financially justifiable. For Supper Mario Broth, it was more urgent: the power was about to go out. This is how fans learned the reason Supper Mario Broth sometimes went without updates is because its author lacked “funds to consistently pay for an Internet connection, a working computer, or even electricity.”

“My veracity policy.” My. A real person runs Supper Mario Broth, but until recently, the guiding presence behind one of Mario’s modern historians has been largely anonymous. But the social currency of likes, retweets, and reblogs doesn’t translate into money, and a moment of financial vulnerability forced Supper Mario Broth’s author to launch a Patreon , creating a personal connection between creator and fan that’s becoming more common.

Most people would probably issue a correction and move on, but not Supper Mario Broth, and this zeal-like dedication to accuracy is one of the many reasons people love the blog.

Tonally, Supper Mario Broth is equal parts fascinating and bewildering. The blog’s steadfast dedication to pinpoint accuracy often comes across as part of a larger, tongue-in-cheek performance built around a potentially unhealthy obsession with Mario factoids. Last week, for example, Supper Mario Broth said it took down a tweet because it “mistakenly identified a Zip disk as a floppy disk.” The tweet was removed “in accordance to my veracity policy.”

Before asking for help, he was on the verge of being evicted.

“This was just one of the times where I was out of options in real-life,” he said, “and had to turn to the Internet, to the readers of my blog, to help out.”

Broth does have a job, one where he works with elderly individuals from Alzheimer’s and other mental afflictions, but it doesn’t pay very well. This wasn’t the only time he’s turned to fans for money, either. Separate from Supper Mario Broth, he runs a Paper Mario comic influenced by the fan-favorite game The Thousand-Year Door , and during another time where money dried up, he requested commissions from regular readers to fill the gaps.

“When I first saw Mario on the screen, I thought ‘This is it. this is my life now.’ And it was. It still is.”

“It was very saddening, but I'm, of course, more glad that this could help me out of the trouble I had at that time than than the fact that I needed to sell them,” he said. “Because in the end—this just may sound a little bit sentimental—but these Mario games are all living on inside my own head. I do not need consoles to close my eyes and imagine myself playing Super Mario Bros.”

His problems aren’t simple, though, and have repeated in recent years. A little while back, he was forced to sell every video game he’s ever owned, including the consoles they ran on. The majority of his collection was Mario-related, and some of the items went back decades.

The Patreon has become an extension of his “veracity policy,” a commitment to absolute transparency. In recapping the first week of Supper Mario Broth’s Patreon backing, he noted, among other things, a “279% increase in output in the first week on the main and side blogs.” The level of specificity borders on disturbing, especially if it’s reflective of someone feeling as though taking crowdfunded money means having to document everything being done with it.

Or...it’s a bit? Part of the the ironic humor embedded in everything Supper Broth Blog does?

“To support something as preposterous as a Mario variety blog with real, actual money, you have to get some value back,” he said. “I want to make it clear people are getting value back.”

This is just how Broth is, both online and in real-life. He’s aware of how it’s perceived.

“I'm not a humorous person,” he said. “I'm the sort of person who likes facts. If you have looked at my blog for even a second, you might have noticed that the content post is very outlandish, but it is all factual. And I realized that outlandish factual content looks a lot like joke content.”

But it wasn’t always that way. These days, Supper Mario Broth is run by a single person, but when the blog launched in 2012, there were two authors. (Like Broth, the other author asked to remain anonymous.) The other author focused on humorous one-offs, like audio clips where Luigi says “thunder” over and over for several minutes, while Broth stayed in factland.

The two knew each other in real-life, and bonded over a shared hobby. The name Supper Mario Broth came from a brainstorming session where Super Mario Borscht and Soapy Mario Bath were both names they almost settled on. But they decided to stay in the realm of food, thanks to the series’ regular theming around the topic, and Supper Mario Broth stuck.

In 2016, the other author decided to move on from the blog, following a hiatus. The rights were transferred to Broth, and he decided to make sweeping changes. For one, he deleted anything that wasn’t 100% factual, but more controversially, took down many of the humor posts, like the legitimately funny Luigi “thunder” track. This prompted a backlash among fans, and he was later forced to apologize. Some of the more popular posts were then reinstated, albeit with a new disclaimer from Broth that proved funny for reasons he likely didn’t intend:

“Disclaimer: The content of this post is for entertainment purposes only and is not intended to be factual information about the Mario series.”

This is an extension of the aforementioned “veracity” policy rolled out in early 2017.

“Normally, I do not try to trouble my readers. I know that people come to Supper Mario Broth just to see some Mario facts. They do not come here to listen to my problems.”

Whatever the ups and downs, Broth is able to come back to his love for Mario, a passion that goes beyond the intricacies of platforming and into the world, characters, and overall aesthetic. The moment he played Super Mario Bros. 3 at three years old, he was hooked in a way that went beyond merely liking how it played.