MARIO Victim #1

About

MARIO Victim #1 or Victim 1 refers to a distorted image of a distressed person found in the files of the creepypasta Super Mario World ROM hack "MARIO." The image was discovered in December 2010 when the story was first shared on the SMWCentral forum, inspiring fan art and memes referencing it. Over the following years, people began searching for the origins of the image, finally discovering the original, unedited photo in September 2023.

Origin

M A R I O: A SMWC Creepypasta

On December 28th, 2010, SMWCentral^[1] user Adam posted a creepypasta, along with a link to a Super Mario World ROM hack, about his discovery of a ROM hack titled "MARIO." The hack's download folder contained a .txt file titled 3007014.txt. Adam launched the ROM and noticed Mario's character sprite colors looked "dull." He then noticed a paragraph of text had been changed in the game that claims Mario is the antagonist of the hack, not Bowser. Upon entering the "Yoshi's House" level, Adam found that the house was gone and was met with a text box consisting of binary code that translates to "notepad" (shown below).

The level "Yoshi's Island 1" was renamed "Never Come Back" and upon entering it, Adam was jump-scared by Bowser's clown car sound effect. He writes:

I also noticed that there was a brown used block near the spot where the banzai bill normally shows up. I can only assume this was a revisit to the level after I had beaten it like I heard in some half assed creepy stories in other Mario games. Now I was wondering why things were like this, making me wonder about the intro message. Had Mario done something previously to dinosaur land? Was this in Bowser's point of view? I quickly dismissed the latter option, because it seemed kind of stupid. So that left me thinking that Mario at one point and time in the Author's story, did something, but what?

Adam hits a box and receives a black text box reading "I hate you." He eventually finds the box that usually spawns Yoshi, but hits it and receives another message claiming that Mario trapped Yoshi in the egg. Adam finds several more eerie messages within boxes as he plays, including a message reading "but is there anything I can do to change your mind?" and one reading "this is the selfish way out." Another cryptic message read, "You get if you cut the at the end. If you collect you can" (shown below).

After defeating Iggy, another message box appeared talking about "Victim #1," reading, "Victim #1. Eyeballs were unable to be found. The victim was found lying on her carpet. Causes of death unknown, handmarks with unidentifiable fingerprints were found all over the corpse" (shown below). At the end of the hack, Adam finds a room with a pit that Mario must jump down, then go down a pit. The user writes that he believes Mario was "atoning for his actions" throughout the game, with the pit and pipe representing Mario's descent into Hell.

I was then taken to a small room, with what seemed like a pit, and a wall. I jumped down the pit seeing as how there was no other option, though I found that the bottom of the pit was solid. I tried pressing down in a bunch of areas untill I came across a pipe. Mario slowly did the pipe transition downwards off the screen. Expecting another level, I waited, but there was no more. Just a black screen. I was unable to continue. Unable to pause or exit the level, or move. There was nothing, nothing at all. This was the video game representation of death, a crash. Mario had died….

After playing, I think I finally understand what was happening. I believe Mario was atoning for his actions, eventually being plummeted into a hell that looked exactly like yoshi's island, where, he was lost to the grip of death, forever….

Victim #1 Image

On December 29th, 2010, SMWCentral^[2] user Kieran Menor posted a comment to the thread claiming they converted 3007014.txt into a JPEG file and found an edited image of a face, tinted and distorted to be red and black, seemingly screaming with dark pits for eyes (shown below). Some suspect this is meant to be an image of Victim #1 as described in Adam's story.

Spread

The creepypasta and, in particular, the image of Victim #1, became the subject of fan art, memes and content over the following years, also inspiring people to search for the original, unedited image. On November 18th, 2022, Redditor /u/Ank57 made a post to /r/creepypasta^[7] claiming the image is originally one of English broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson, garnering over 428 upvotes in 10 months (shown below, left). On November 20th, Redditor /u/trickydaclown555 made a post to /r/FridayNightFunkin^[8] sharing artwork of Victim #1 from the Friday Night Funkin' mod "Mario's Monday night massacre,"^[9] garnering over 470 upvotes in the same span of time (shown below, right).

September 2023 Original "Victim #1" Image Discovery

On September 1st, 2023, YouTuber^[3] Midnight Krick posted a brief video claiming that someone in the "Victimcord" Discord server with the username "G O D" found the original image used for Victim #1, with the alleged creator of the image confirming that it is the real original image (shown below). The video gained over 21,900 views in four days.

That day, X,^[4] formerly Twitter, user @blameitonjorge shared the discovery along with four images, showing four photos of the image being procedurally edited to resemble Victim #1, garnering over 42,900 likes in four days (shown below).

While the exact backstory of the image is unclear, it has been available on flickr^[5] as a stock image titled "creepy me" since February 25th, 2007, where it gained over 24,000 views in 16 years. It was possibly taken at a Harajuku festival that year, as the Flickr^[6] user uploaded other photos of people in costume at a Harajuku festival around the same time.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References