Super Mario Clouds is the work of said to be hacking by ArcAngel. It has become an iconic piece of modified game art and pop art. He attained a copy of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros and removed all the elements of the games except for the moving clouds. However, while he claimed to have hacked the game, which he highlights as having “no generational lost” in the final product for viewers, further insight into the programming behind Super Mario Clouds shows that ArcAngel didn’t just leave the clouds alone. There’s a change in color palette that is notably unlike what Nintendo would’ve used and a closer look at the coding behind the cloud shape reveals a small change. Patrick LeMieux’s remaking of Super Mario Clouds reveals the difference between ArcAngel’s piece and if the original game was really stripped away of everything but the clouds. If ArcAngel’s Super Mario Clouds was really meant to be an authentic hack of Super Mario Bros, the detail of the coin at sprite zero would’ve had to remain such as in LeMieux’s Coin Heaven. This casts doubt on how much of Super Mario Clouds really is a Rom hack.

I think that the nostalgia given to Super Mario Clouds by saying it’s a Rom hack brings part of the attention to the piece, but on its own, its a homebrew take on a simple element of the game that emphasizes the actual art of it. The claim of a direct representation of the original game builds its appeal, however, I still like how stand alone it is as a work of pop art.