A little over a year ago, Nintendo launched a service called Miiverse that allows players to post short, Twitter-like messages from inside their games. As with the rest of the Internet, the content of these posts ranges from kind of awesome to completely soul crushing. However, there's more to this Miiverse thing than meets the eye. In November of 2012, a glitch briefly allowed some Nintendo users to access forbidden parts of Miiverse -- I was one of those users, and while digging around in Nintendo's files hoping to find confirmation that they'll someday do a sequel to Shaq Fu, I came across something even more shocking. It turns out that Miiverse has been around for much, much longer than we thought, and -- I'm aware of how fantastic this sounds -- the earliest posts are from Mario himself. Yes, Dr. Mario "Super Mario" Mario, noted plumber, kart driver, and Olympic medalist, is apparently a real person.

I took as many screenshots as I could before getting booted out, and after carefully mulling over the legal, cultural, and sociopolitical consequences of this discovery for an entire year, I've finally decided to share this information with the world. And so, here are Mario's earliest games, as documented from his own perspective. The following absolutely real images (again, I cannot stress enough how much I didn't make this shit up just now) paint a picture of man who is simple-minded, somewhat brave, but most of all utterly confused.