History of SMBX

Super Mario Bros. X (Known as SMBX) - is a Mario fan game engine, written by Andrew 'Redigit' Spinks in 2009 year. Game is written on Visual Basic 6 (VB6). Project development was stopped in 2011, and SMBX 1.3 is the last official version Redigit has released.

Founding of SMBX
The month was June, in the year 2009. Some random dude named Andrew Spinks had created a Mario fangame called Super Mario Bros. X and posted it on his new site, SuperMarioBrothers.org. The forums (supermariobrothers.org/forums) quickly gained traffic, and some of the first users to join were piejacker, Quill, and Coldwin who you may know. As this site and game gained popularity, Andrew (who will from now on be called "Redigit") released betas and new versions over the coming months. With a larger community you'd think he would need some moderators, and Kyasarin/Luminous were promoted along with Kuribo somewhere along the line. On April 5th, 2010, Knuckles96 made these forums and they slowly grew, but we're going to leave this out until the very end. An SMBX IRC channel was formed on freenode, but the staff caught it and made Redigit change the name from #smbx to ##smbx due to freenode's rules. They shortly moved to FOSSnet (bikcmp's network) after that.

SMBX 1.2
By July of 2010, SMBX was at version 1.2.2. Kyasarin, Luminous, and 4matsy were administrators now, with DarkMatt and Vandarx being the moderators. The community had turned into a cauldron of hate. New users weren't treated properly, nobody was given a second chance, Kyasarin and Luminous had become very irrational of administrators, and the only way to not get banned was to follow in their footsteps (this explains the attitudes of DarkMatt, Vandarx, and TrinityFlash). Somewhere around the end of July/beginning of August, Redigit decided to close down the forums. He'd had enough of keeping up with the community and has said himself that without Kyasarin and Luminous he would've closed it down long ago. bikcmp of FOSSnet immediately put up new official forums (cdn-01.bikcmp.com/smbx/fourm/index.php) for two weeks that ended up having the same problems. Luminous said something to the extent of "Leave this place and get back to your so-called 'normal lives'," and then dropped the SMBX IRC chatroom. A few days to about two weeks passed and the only people left in the chat were Vandarx (an op), Spitfire (a common network user), CaptainTrek (a network administrator), and ddashlover (just a normal user). On August 25th, 2010, CaptainTrek decided to form new SMBX forums (trekweb.org/smbx-forum) on his server (TrekWeb.org) and Redigit supported by crowning it as the new official forums. Vandarx and Spitfire were the new administrators. ddashlover changed his name to fallingsnow and became a moderator. He also brought Blaarg in, and he became a moderator as well. Skittlez12 (now known as just Skittlez) was there as a mod too. Around the same time, the SMBX splash page was updated with a new video showing the Ice Flower and linking to the new forums. This confirmed that Redigit was still working on SMBX.

SMBX 1.3
The official SMBX forums were alive again thanks to CaptainTrek, and in October of 2010 Redigit released SMBX 1.3 to the public. This included many new features such as the Ice Flower, quicksand, and a lot more NPCs. It even contained some unused stuff, like the frog suit graphic Knux found a few weeks ago. Despite popular belief, Redigit did actually start working on SMBX version 1.3.1 after 1.3's release. In one of his playthroughs of The Great Empire, he mentioned working on SMBX's multiplayer. Later, though, this was cut short.

Trouble on the forums
The SMBX community was doing fine until December 2010 when CaptainTrek's server failed, causing a deletion of most of the data of the forums. A backup could've been restored but he chose to instead start the forums over again. During this 2-3 week period in which the forums were gone, many users fled to Knuckles96's forums, causing it to grow. The official forums were put back up for a while until January where CaptainTrek wanted to take a break. It was during this time that Redigit officially announced that he halted work on SMBX (we all kinda knew it was over anyway) and that no new forum would earn the title of "official". Some people were still skeptical because he had a record of "quitting" in the past. It was in January of 2011 that Redigit began work on Terraria, back when it was called ProjectWorld.

Abounding of SMBX development
The SMBX forums were put back up in January and lasted until the beginning of April. CaptainTrek was tired of running the forums and was going to bring them down for good. Redigit came in to the SMBX IRC chatroom and officially announced that SMBX is by his a-- for his a--, and the now commonly accepted belief was that SMBX is finished. This left Knux's forum and fallingsnow's forum to be the only SMBX forums left. However, I don't think any of us were expecting what was about to happen.

One Saturday morning, Reborg (a fellow Terraria alpha tester) asked me on the IRC if I had heard what happened. I said that I hadn't and he told me the whole story. Redigit came on later, and then posted the following:

"Last Friday I received a call from Nintendo's lawyers asking me to remove Super Mario Bros. X from the site and delete all SMBX videos from my Youtube account. They also asked me to transfer SuperMarioBrothers.org over to them. I have complied with their first two wishes, but I do not want to lose SuperMarioBrothers.org. It is a good Mario fansite, even without Super Mario Bros. X. They were going to decide on that and get back to me. I was waiting to hear back from them before I made any statement about this, but the rumors needed to be cleared up. I have a lot of respect for Nintendo and never intended to cause any problems for them.

I am going to ask that you guys refrain from posting copies of SMBX on the internet, as it goes against Nintendo's wishes and could make things more complicated for me."

It was an unfortunate time for SMBX, lots of great content was lost. Some people think that Redigit was trolling (which isn't an illegitimate claim, Red is in fact a troll at times), but here are some fun facts that can prove that otherwise.

Redigit actually told us (Terraria testers) at length what happened and how weird it was. First, he did not receive any written communication or email. This was all done by phone. Second, they called him on his cell phone. How they got his cell phone number is beyond me, but he could've put it in privacy policies somewhere on one of his sites. Third, this was done by a (local?) Seattle law firm (Redigit lives in Indiana). However, this law firm is legitimate as far as I know and you can take a look at it if you want. This could have been a prank call but I doubt that because the call he received was from the actual law firm listed above. Even if Redigit was trolling he wouldnt've removed every single one of his YouTube videos. He's even said that he wants SMBX still on the internet for people to use. This was not the "end of SMBX". SMBX had ended months before, but that only means development has stopped. You still have a wonderful engine for making your own Mario levels, use it instead of dwelling on what is past.

It was at this point that Redigit stopped all affiliation with SMBX. He was done. Terraria was nearing publicity and he had better things to worry about. This was the end of the official road of Super Mario Bros. X, but there's still more to this story.

Later, at at December 2013, SMBX Community came into SuperMarioBrosX.org which was maintained by Joey Miller. Later in 2017~2018 years, the site and other things was transferred to Kley and other people.

SMBX 1.3.0.1
This update made by Joey and Valtteri just a cosmetic updates and fixes of the included graphics, music, and sounds. Technically it's still the same SMBX 1.3. Because development was abandoned by Redigit without opening the source code, the community does many attempts to hack the SMBX binary in various ways: a replacement of hardcoded graphics and some string data; Reverse engining and DLL-Injection which causes a founding of LunaDLL project (which now is a LunaLUA).

Future of SMBX
During one of the TrekWeb blackouts, fallingsnow ended up making his own SMBX forums. These are the ones mentioned in the current #smbx which has now lost all ops except for Spitfire and fallingsnow. People also started to make their own spinoffs and other level editors/games, like NSMBX, Super Mario Limitless, and SMB:R (in that order).

Super Mario Bros: Remastered (SMB:R)
Super Mario Bros: Remastered (SMB:R) (a.k.a. NSMBX ) had the most publicity in the months of June-September 2011, so it developed the largest community of the smaller spin-off forums, despite not having much progress beyond what was publicized. This large community eventually merged with Cloud's forum amidst controversy with whether or not it would merge with Knux's forum and became SMBX Revived, but continued to grow and was (post and traffic-wise) the second largest SMBX forum. After merging with Cloud's forum, SMBX Revived became the most active forum, beating Knux's forum.

Unfortunately, Project has been canceled in January of 2012. NSMBX Forums was kept as backup discussion platform which was sometimes used while official SMBX forums server is down. In September 18, 2016, the owner of NSMBX Forums announced the closing of forums with locking current state for read-only.

LunaDLL
In 09 May 2013 a user named kil3 released a hack of SMBX which extends the possibilities you can do with SMBX. This is an attempt to continue life of SMBX engine even without source code. With LunaDLL is possible to have almost any low-level modification of SMBX core with adding new things and manipulating with existing stuff.

Visual Super Mario Bros. X (VSMBX)
Visual Super Mario Bros. X - project by Aero (also known as AeroMatter or GhostHawk) founded in March/April of 2012'th year. Project is creating with using of VisualBasic.NET on .NET Framework 4 platform. The goal of VSMBX is to first recreate SMBX and then add on new features and content with far more flexibility. VSMBX will be open source (starting December 25th of 2014 year) for everyone, and anyone to create versions of their own that fit their needs and the needs of others and share them on this forum, on the VSMBX forums at vsmbxforums.prophpbb.com (now no more available) where anyone you want can download. VSMBX will be primarily designed for Windows, unless if or when popular opinion gravitates to cross-platform support. Since August 4 2016, AeroMatter announced discontinuing on his official discussion thread.

Platform Game Engine Project (PGE Project)
Platform Game Engine project - project by Wohlstand founded in February 2014 after finishing of SMBX64 research works first step. Project going as independent game engine based on SMBX's content standard and technical stuff. This is a first SMBX successor project which provides a full compatibility with original SMBX's stuff and can work with SMBX specific stuff natively: with PGE you can open, edit, play SMBX's levels and episodes, you can edit and create new levels, world maps, NPC configs and use this stuff in original SMBX. The main reason why PGE going as independent from SMBX Universe game engine is a Wohlstand's strategy to provide legal protection of project to prevent repeating of old Redigit's mistake which caused official removing of the SMBX. With PGE, SMBX will continue it's live as configuration package for PGE which provides a full implementation of original SMBX on new platform. SMBX Universe will continue life as new SMB-Xtended project planned by Wohlstand when main PGE stuff will be completely implemented. Unlike previous SMBX successors, PGE coded in the C++ and going to be cross-platform: Linux, Windows and for Mac OS X, and later Android. Unlike SMBX, PGE going as multi-component system which includes Editor, Engine and additional tools. While engine part in development state, Editor part is using by community as more advanced alternate editing toolset to work with SMBX levels and episodes.

LunaDLL with Lua (LunaLUA)
LunaLUA - is a continuation of LunaDLL project started by Kevsoft in September 2014 with adding of LUA scripting sub-system which allows extending SMBX with user-friendly and flexible LUA scripts. LunaLUA also a platform which Wohlstand uses for some researches of SMBX which uses in PGE development. LunaLUA and PGE are being developed by the same community (PGE Community, later known as WohlSoft).

Super Mario Brox. X By 38A
SMBX-38A - a Chinese SMBX Engine implementation by 5438A38A, unofficial SMBX continuation by Chinese guy 5438A38A who did reverse engining of SMBX 1.3 and implemented some new features to it. Before recent times it was known as a fake. On September 13, 2015, by Snoopy Tour was made a post with a link to Baidu where Unofficial SMBX 1.4.1 was published, but people are not beloved him. Kevsoft tried to find a download link and finally found it, downloaded recent build from Baidu Pan and tried to test it on Windows 7 x64, but failed. When he sent this build to Wohlstand, he found a way to run it in Windows XP using virtual box. Later Wohlstand contacted the original author and cooperated with him.

Super Mario Bros. X2
Super Mario Bros. X2 (SMBX2) - is an extension mod of SMBX 1.3, is a combining of LunaLua framework, of PGE devkit (mainly for use of PGE Editor), and a brand-new launcher which does use of Qt and WebKit (eventually it was been replaced with a QWebEngine), founded by Horikawa Otane in December 2015 (before that moment there are was early prepare works done in a secret). It's positioning now as a mainstream SMBX that makes vanilla SMBX 1.3 to be an obsolete thing, even the fact it's still be used as a main core, even it was hacked, extended and modded by using of LunaLua framework. Since SMBX2 was founded, LunaLua is no more releasing as a standalone framework as it was continued to be developed as a main counterpart and core of SMBX2 project.

TheXTech
TheXTech - a cross-platform port of SMBX Engine written in C++, made from original SMBX' VB6 source code by Wohlstand with two purposes: get a better research model needed for PGE Engine; providing an alternative and fully-compatible with SMBX game engine to play all old episodes accurate with no gameplay differences.

Current state
As of now, SMBX Community now is staying at SuperMarioBrosX.org. SMBX is still in demand, and constantly receives new levels, graphics and even episodes.

Source code
Since 10 years after last release in October 2010, In February 2, 2020, the original source code of SMBX 1.3 has been finally released and published on GitHub with a MIT license.

Links

 * Original SMBX history page
 * Current SMBX community site and forums
 * Collected SMBX:R Source code package (VB.NET)
 * VSMBX Official Thread
 * A2XT Project at Talkhaus