I never played SM when it was originally out for some reason that's long since been forgotten. I first played it maybe 2 or 3 years ago and found it fantastic. Completely divorced from any nostalgia, I found myself really getting engrossed in the story, the environment and the design.

Even though it was 16-bit and 2D, I was completely absorbed in the environment. It feels like almost every screen and task had been poured over and over and polished until it was perfect.

It's actually kind of hard to play other games that haven't received that kind of attention because you feel the subjective difference.

It's so wonderfully designed that, even though the game ends up being pseudo-linear (everything you're going to do to progress has been more or less pre-determined), it felt like a world I really wanted to spend more time in and that I had an amazing amount of agency.

It's definitely one of those games that clearly qualifies as art in the sense that it has a story to tell and emotions it wants to evoke, while at the same time remaining interactive. I feel like this is the kind of level that Ebert was challenging games to reach when he claimed they weren't art.