Awesome deconstruction.
Reminds me fondly of Egoraptor's Megaman X review.

That's exactly how I found out about the warps.. I lived in this apartment complex and the kid upstairs got a nintendo so he was the shit, but back then guns of any kind marketed to children (GI Joe, Light Gun, etc), at least with my parents' community, were frowned upon, and he turned out having nightmares after playing Zelda so they took the Nintendo away. I don't think it was until 1990 when I actually played Mario, and by that point most people had some other newer system.

After much passive aggressive 8-year-old behavior, my parents finally got me a Nintendo for Christmas 1990 (the one with the Powerpad, Track and Field and Mario and no gun..) long story short I found the warp after dying over and over on 4-1 and having to start over, and life was grand after that.

A few years ago a friend and I dusted off an old NES and Super Mario Bros, and he got very pissed at me for purposefully skipping the first warp zone. Then he quickly realized he never actually played the vast majority of the game since he'd always just tried to beat it as quickly as possible. We actually had fun with it, even though we couldn't get past 6-3.