LEVEL Magazine, Issue #44 featuring a 6-page article on The Excavation of Mushroom Island
I was recently honored when LEVEL Magazine (the top video game magazine in Sweden) approached me about writing a feature on my book, The Excavation of Mushroom Island. The issue was released November 2009 in Sweden, and I recently received my copy of the magazine as well as a translated version thanks to my Swedish friend, Mózsi Kiss. Here is the complete article in English for your enjoyment.
The first spread from a 6-page article about my book, The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
The Excavation of Mushroom Kingdom, by Johan Martinsson
A newly published archaeological document reveals one of the most astonishing discoveries of modern history – what we call “Mushroom Kingdom” has once existed. LEVEL has read The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
“In 1983, an up and coming biology student from the University of North Florida, by the name of Logan Zawacki, was awarded the Denise K. Weaver Grant with the intent of monitoring the short-tailed albatross population on the Japanese island of Izu-Torishima, also known as “Bird Island.” Little did he know this research project would lead to the biggest archaeological find of the 20th century.”
– from The Excavation of Mushroom Island foreword
Izu-Torishima is a small island, about five square kilometers, located some 600 kilometers south of Tokyo, in the middle of the Philippine Sea. In reality, it is the top of an active underwater volcano, which has had two eruptions during the 20th century. The second time this occurred, in 1939, no one was harmed, fortunately. Sadly, this was because the entire population of the island had been wiped out in 1902, which was the time of the first eruption. Needless to say, it is extremely dangerous to venture into the crater of this volcano.
Still, this is exactly what Logan Zawacki does, shortly after arriving at the island. He descends into the volcano in order to study the brooding ground of the red albatross, but instead, he finds something completely different. He gets lost in the darkness of the narrow crater, and ends up in a winding subterranean tunnel, sloping downwards. He walks in the pitch black for a long, long time – and when he finally sees light again, he realizes that he has ended up in a completely different place. On a forgotten island, somewhere in the vicinity of Izu-Torishima.
On the island, Zawacki finds traces of an ancient culture, previously unfamiliar to him. Skeletal remains from animals unlike anything he has seen before. Sculptures telling stories he has never heard before.
Eventually he finds his way back through the tunnel, only to return later to the lost place – which he names “Mushroom Island” – with his science team. Over the course of nine years they study the islands, and they make some of the most surprising discoveries of modern archaeological history.
The second spread from a 6-page article about my book, The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
And when you read The Excavation of Mushroom Island – the newly published book where the results of their research is published, you discover the most surprising thing of them all. Every single discovery coincides with the world portrayed in Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario games.
On September 13, 1985, Zawacki and his team unearth the first complete skeleton. It basically consists of a big jaw and two feet, and it is described as one of the most common creatures from the early civilizations of the island – whose inhabitants used to call the finding place “Goomba’s Domain.”
In July of 1986, they find a square-shaped container made of compact reddish sand, which turns out to contain a large amount of coins. Zawacki writes: “The located coins were used during the early Nesolithic era, and were thought to increase a person’s life-span.”
In June 1990, Zawacki finds a conserved leaf, which is obviously the one referred to in the original inhabitants’ tales of a “Super Leaf.” He discovers that it contains high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (the psychoactive component also found in cannabis) and that its intoxication effects include “a hallucinatory experience of flying” and “an increased sensitivity in the coccyx, similar to the experience of having a tail.”
All in all, the science team was able to document over 30 previously unknown types of flora and fauna, before they had to leave the island. It was their ambition to return, but on August 12, 2002, Izu-Torishima had another volcanic eruption, and the tunnel – which was the only known way to reach the Mushroom Island – was buried under thousands of tons of smoking hot lava.
The lost world was once more lost.
The last spread from a 6-page article about my book, The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
When LEVEL gets a hold of Logan Zawacki, he says that he is now 28 years old and the manager of the photographic laboratory at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida.
28 years? That means that he would have been four years old in 1983, when he supposedly received his first science grant. Something is – as you have of course understood already – not right here.
It turns out that it is all made up. The scholarship, the subterranean tunnel, the forgotten island, the whole story.
Or not all of it. One of these things actually does exist. The book where all this was documented.
It is 76 beautiful pages filled with excavated skeletons from Mario’s world, tons of facts and topographical maps of the invented islands – complete with places such as the “Pipe Maze,” “Vanilla Dome,” and the “Castle of Koopa.”
“Imagine if Mario’s universe really had existed! That idea made me take on the assignment of interpreting the Mario mythology from a more realistic and scientific point of view,” says Zawacki. “Science has always used skeletons as physical proof of ancient cultures, so I decided to do the same.”
Zawacki started searching for pictures of real skeletal parts that could be used to illustrate the fossilized remains of the Mario characters.
“Every fossil consists of several different components that I have joined together. For example, I created Bowser’s skeleton by combining skeletal parts from a bear, an iguana, a turtle and a dolphin.”
After creating the images of the fossils, Zawacki fixed them to the paper through a printing technique that was considered out-dated already in 1860 – all in order to give the reader a feeling of flipping through an old book on anatomy.
The result feels so authentic, it is difficult not to be convinced that both goombas and chain chomps really existed, once upon a time. But the book also lets us know that they do not exist anymore – an insight which leaves the reader unexpectedly discouraged.
The Mushroom Kingdom is one of the places where time stands still. Peach, Luigi and Mario can never age and die – they can only play their roles over and over in a drama that is repeated in infinite, timeless cycles.
But The Excavation of Mushroom Island sees that world in the rear-view mirror. It has been destroyed. All its inhabitants are dead. Page 20 shows the skeleton of the Princess. Zawacki reports that an examination of the body revealed that she had a large tumor in her left breast. On page 49, we learn that a Homo Sapiens male dressed in a green cap with an L-shaped character had been trapped in a pipe and had starved to death. Page 55 reveals the discovery of a human head, which had been separated from the rest of the body by a falling block in the Donut Caverns. It is Mario.
The immortal are dead, and it feels wrong.
“The fact that all the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom were dead became inevitable the exact moment I decided to present them as fossils from a long lost time. And I understood that I had to explain why the characters died to place them in a credible reality – where all people, plants and mythological things have one thing in common: death.”
It is unclear what Shigeru Miyamoto thinks of Logan Zawacki’s scientifically unsentimental way of killing all his iconic characters – but all things considered, it is difficult to think that the game genius would feel anything but honored by The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
Not because it confirms that he has always made historically correct games – but because it confirms that he has made something much more than this. He has created his own history. He has fantasized and turned his fantasies into physical reality.
Once upon a time, the idea of a plumber who jumped on small two-legged brown animals and collected coins to get extra lives, was just some funny thoughts in the head of a young Japanese game designer.
Today, Mario is a reality for billions of people.
The Excavation of Mushroom Island is a tribute to the fantasy and its incredible power. It is difficult to imagine a better way to show Shigeru Miyamoto respect.
**If you’d like to purchase a copy of Logan Zawacki’s The Excavation of Mushroom Island simply visit this link:
Official website for The Excavation of Mushroom Island
Mushroom Island 