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 their own 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 and abounding of SMBX development
The SMBX community was doing fine until December 2010 when CaptainTrek's server failed, causing the 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.

Nintendo's lawyers call and SMBX deletion
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 into 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, people didn't think any of them were expecting what was about to happen.

One Saturday morning, Reborg (a fellow Terraria alpha tester) asked FutureNyanCat2002 on the IRC if he had heard what happened. He said that he hadn't and Reborg told him 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 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. That's unknown, how they got his cell phone number, 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 there are doubts that because the call he received was from the actual law firm listed above. Even if Redigit was trolling he wouldn't have 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.

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, in December 2013, SMBX Community came into SuperMarioBrosX.org which was maintained by Joey Miller.

SMBX 1.3.0.1
This update made by Joey and Valtteri just 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 the LunaDLL project (later known as a LunaLua). In the 2017~2018 years, the site and other things were transferred to Kley and other people.

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). Also, there was the SMBX 1.4 (Don't confuse with the SMBX-38A also known as the SMBX 1.4 too) - was most known for being a fake around YouTube. It would be the next version right after 1.3, but because SMBX development was stopped, nobody was able to continue the original project and thus resulting in there not being a "version 1.4".

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 were kept as a backup discussion platform which was sometimes used while the 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
On 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 the life of the 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 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. The project is created using 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 the 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.

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

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

Super Mario Bros. X By 38A
SMBX-38A, also known as SMBX 1.4 - is a Mario fan game engine, written by 5438A38A as an unofficial successor to the original Super Mario Bros. X by Redigit, developed from the ground up as a clone of SMBX with adding of several new features into 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 a 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 the main core, even it was hacked, extended, and modded by using of LunaLua framework. Since SMBX2 was founded, LunaLua is no more released as a standalone framework as it was continued to be developed as a main counterpart and core of the SMBX2 project.

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 its last release in October 2010, On February 2, 2020, the original source code of SMBX 1.3 has been finally released and published on GitHub with an MIT license.

TheXTech
TheXTech - a platform game engine written in C++, is a full port of SMBX 1.3's source-code which was originally written in Visual Basic 6. Created by Wohlstand one month after the original SMBX's source code has been opened. It was released to the public on March 14, 2020, and has two purposes: providing a free and open-source, cross-platform, and accurate implementation of the SMBX Engine that allows playing old levels and episodes created for the original game by reproducing its behavior; get a more convenient research model for developing the Moondust Engine. Additionally, it has many functional extensions and improvements such as PNG support, GIF recording, LVLX, and WLDX formats support, using the MixerX audio library, sounds.ini and music.ini support, custom player calibrations support, fixing a bunch of vanilla bugs while providing the option to re-enable them back if needed, etc. Unlike the original game, it has support for multiple platforms and operating systems other than Windows such as Linux, macOS, Haiku, Emscripten, and Android. Windows x86_64, and ARM64 builds were also provided.

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