STORY Once upon a time, or maybe twice, there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland. The protectors of Pepperland, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have been captured by the music hating Blue Meanies. Their plan is to ban music and steal all colour. Old Fred in his Yellow Submarine recruited The Beatles to be the new protectors, bring back the music and the colours. Only The Beatles can save Pepperland!

The hack was recently updated to v1.2 to fix some bugs and includes minor level changes.

BACKGROUND The Beatles Adventures in Pepperland is a NES hack that transforms Super Mario Bros 2. into a Beatles-themed game with new levels, enemies, graphics and of course The Beatles music in glorious 8-bit. Play as John, Paul, George and Ringo each equipped with unique abilities. The game is loosely based on the 1968 film Yellow Submarine. which actually had it’s american release on Nov 13, 53 years ago this week.

THE BEATLES

• George is an all-round character who can float in the air for a very short time.
• Paul can flutter jump and can jump pretty high from a stand still, even without a charge jump.
• Ringo is really fast but can’t jump that good. By pressing jump again you’ll give him a small boost.
• John can float in the air for quite some time, but he is the most hesitant to pick up stuff to throw at enemies.

DEVELOPMENT This hack has been the passion project of romhacker Nesdraug for quite some time. Development started January 11, 2019. One year later Shauing joined Nesdraug to function as the music programmer and that’s where the development really began.

Over the course of the production many fans of The Beatles and romhacking in general joined and helped with adding graphics, codes and feedback. MednaTheGreat helped to make the sprites look more professional and Iridium_ionizer designed some of the Bosses. Shauing also designed the Submarine on the title screen and the Bulldog boss.

SMB2Edit was used to create the levels and previous SMB2 hacks by GlitchCat7 and Ridley X where used as inspiration for some of the levels.

The team learned a lot, much thanks to The SMB2 Discombobulators who helped with questions about ASM and provided a full disassemble of SMB2

PAL VERSION There were requests of a PAL version of the game (The Beatles are a European band after all) in order to play on PAL hardware. The team only worked on a NTSC version, but in on the download there’s link to a EXPERIMENTAL speed up version of the game but it has not been tested on PAL hardware.

Now, there’s only one way to go out. Singing!⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

The Soundtrack: