There’s a guy fairly recently that has been enjoying a few minutes of e-notoriety, because he’s producing recreations of particular cities’ public rail transportation maps, themed with Super Mario Bros. 3 sprites. At a quick glance, he’s done SMB3-themed maps for Portland, Washington D.C., and a few Canadian cities like Calgary, Montreal and Toronto.
I’ll admit that they’re cute, it’s kind of a creative idea, but the fact of the matter is that he’s still using someone else’s properties as its theme. Regardless, despite the fact that they are aesthetically pleasant to look at, the one glaring flaw in all of them is the fact that they’re all pretty general and standardized. Every single one of them is based on the SMB3 map of World 1, which is all pleasing, happy and green grassland.
I get what the guy is doing, and that he’s clearly going for consistency in his productions. But this is where I state that I live in reality, and the truth of the matter is that the world is not this happy-go-lucky, bobbing-in-the-wind green grassland. I can’t really speak most of the Canadian cities, but I have been to Portland, and I used to live in the D.C. area enough to have an opinion of his Metro map, but I didn’t really bother other than a few cursory snide, curmudgeon remarks with the latter.
But then the guy made an Atlanta map, featuring MARTA’s rail map. This is where I decided that the time for sarcastic commentary was over, and it was time to act on my claims that I could make a more accurate SMB3-themed map for MARTA (click intro pic to see full size).
See, I live in Atlanta. I don’t know where this guy lives, but I have to assume somewhere in Canada because his site indicates he likes hockey, and frankly no American would bother doing these maps for a Canadian city. I have to wonder if this guy has ever been to Atlanta before, much less ridden a MARTA train. Because if he has, even though he’s trying to maintain consistency with all his maps, there is no rational way in hell he could keep a straight face, and continue to apply happy green grass sprites adorning the sides of a MARTA map. It just would not be possible.
MARTA is one of the city’s biggest embarrassments. I actually feel bad for people who come to Atlanta to be tourists, and rely on MARTA to be their primary transportation. I can only imagine the excitement in tourists begin to melt away when they hop aboard the MARTA train, joined by legions of people who don’t turn their blasting rap down, and people who eat greasy stinky food to no enforcement, and those who inconsiderately don’t yield for the elderly or handicapped. I feel bad for them when a shouting match between some irate locals causes everyone to quietly become paralyzed, and hope that things don’t escalate, while they film on their smartphones so they can show their friends or upload to World Star Hip Hop. And if they try to ignore the bad passengers by staring out the windows and trying to see what the sights of Atlanta has to afford, they’re shown nothing but slums, graffiti all over train yards, and passing over City Hall, the courthouse, and the dirty part of downtown Atlanta where parts of Zombieland and The Walking Dead were filmed at.
But back to the topic at hand, the MARTA map this guy made was dreadfully inaccurate. There is very little of MARTA’s map that should be represented by happy, cheery World 1 grassland. As I snidely remarked to everyone who glazed over how cool it was on their Facebook feeds, it was inaccurate, and most of Atlanta, despite the fact that I call this place home, and I actually really do kind of like it here, would be better represented by the skulls and fires of Bowser’s World 8 stage map.
And since people so often don’t really care about what people say unless they back up their words, I decided to take it upon myself to actually do what I said should do, and I re-created MARTA’s map using SMB3 sprites, that I think are more accurate at representing Atlanta.
