In 1993, no one had ever made a live-action movie based on a video game. In the spring of that year, Super Mario Bros. demonstrated why.

Stories about the film are the stuff of Hollywood legend. Though Super Mario Bros. had the blessing of Nintendo, which had created the world of Mario and his brother Luigi in 1985, things went from bad to worse on a production that seemed cursed the moment the first word of the first draft was written. By the time the film was released, there was no hope. “We lost the actors,” says co-director Rocky Morton, who calls the experience “humiliating” and “deeply hurtful.”

Thirty years after the original was released, Inverse speaks to eight of the people involved in the doomed production to find out exactly what happened.

It was all anyone could talk about for a week straight: the smelly seaweed blob straight out of a bad ‘80s sci-fi horror movie.

Earlier this month, headlines from outlets ranging from CNN to The New York Times to The Guardian bemoaned an encroaching “5000-mile” seaweed blob hitting Florida coastlines and ruining your beach vacation with its profound stench of rotting eggs.

But Inverse spoke with experts who said the sensational news headlines failed to capture the true nature of the looming seaweed — known as sargassum — which has actually been ongoing for a decade and has its roots in climate change, among other factors.