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The Great Giana Sisters!
That Farrah Fawcett-haired, Julia Duffy-faced, pointy-titties-and-hard-nips-having video game goddess above is the Great Giana! The Great Giana Sisters was released on Commodore 65 in 1987 and was later released onto other platforms like Atari. You may think that Giana’s greatest skill was paralyzing her enemies with her beauty and glamour, but some think that Giana’s greatest skill was shamelessly ripping off Super Mario. Nintendo even let a trick know that Giana better step off their corner. But Giana didn’t give a fuck and rose to the top of video game royalty (she didn’t, but in my mind of delusion, she did!).
Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. debuted in 1983 and follows Mario and his brother Luigi as they take on enemies in the Mushroom Kingdom to save Princess Peach Toadstool. The plot of The Great Giana Sisters was a little different and EDGIER. Giana suffers from nightmares and when she falls into a deep, dark sleep, she ends up in a dream world where she has to fight monsters to save her sister Maria. Once Giana beats the final boss and saves Maria, Maria wakes her up and you win the game. But beyond ripping off Super Mario Bros.’ title, The Great Giana Sisters’ gameplay was a copy-paste job. Giana destroyed enemies by bopping on those bitches and got money by hitting blocks. And the first level is a direct copy of Super Mario’s first level. Hey, at least Giana doesn’t have to save a royal named Prince Nectarine MushroomCaps. The creators must have been so focused on thieving from Super Mario that they didn’t even notice that they spelled their main character’s name wrong in the intro of the game. And the Giana on the cover compared to Giana in the opening shot is the Mona Lisa of “What I Bought Versus What I Got.”
Ripping off popular video games is nothing new, but The Great Giana Sisters’ thievery was so shamelessly blatant that Nintendo called their lawyers. ArcadeAttack says that it’s alleged that Time Warp originally put together a complete copy of Super Mario Bros. that was playable on home computers. They brought it to Nintendo, hoping that Nintendo would give them the license to release the game on home computers. Shockingly, Nintendo told them to eat an 8-bit shit. But instead of just scrapping the game and working on something original, Time Warp changed the characters, title, and some of the graphics and put it out into the world.
Apparently, people who bought and played The Great Giana Sisters didn’t hate it, but Nintendo did, of course. There’s a rumor that Nintendo hit Time Warp with a copyright infringement lawsuit, but there’s no proof of that. Although, it seems that Nintendo did use their power to get Giana pulled off of shelves. via ArcadeAttack:
There is also another rumour that Nintendo did not actually file any lawsuit but were still involved in the quick withdrawal of the game from the market. It is quite obvious that the least Nintendo did was threaten legal action – this alone may have been enough to convince Rainbow Arts to immediately stop production of the game and titles soon vanished from the shop floor.
The Great Giana Sisters ended up becoming a cult classic and it’s hard to find original copies. There are a few on eBay but the sellers want nearly $5,000 for a copy! But that wasn’t the end of Giana. Time Warp made a sequel, which was originally titled Giana 2: Arthur and Martha in Future World, but they changed that shit in fear that Nintendo’s lawyers would stomp on their asses again. It was released as Hard’n’Heavy in 1989. Eventually, Time Warp licensed the Giana Sisters characters to another company, and they released several Giana Sisters games, and the games are available on Nintendo DS.
You know, it’s time for another showdown between Super Mario and his Wish.com copycat. Hollywood is doing a Super Mario movie starring the voice of Chris Pratt. So we obviously need a Great Giana Sisters movie and Lady Gaga can recycle her House of Gucci accent to voice Giana. It’ll be the battle of the WTF Italian accents.
Pic: IGN