High-quality physics instruction is contextualized, motivates students to learn, and represents the discipline as a way of investigating the world rather than as a collection of facts and equations. Inquiry-oriented pedagogy, such as problem-based instruction, holds great promise for both teaching physics content and representing the process of doing real science. A challenge for physics teachers is to find instructional contexts that are meaningful, accessible, and motivating for students. Today's students are spending a growing fraction of their lives interacting with virtual environments, and these environments--physically realistic or not--can provide valuable contexts for physics explorations and lead to thoughtful discussions about decisions that programmers make when designing virtual environments. In this article, I describe a problem-based approach to calculus-based kinematics instruction that contextualizes students' learning within the Super Mario Bros. video game--a game that is more than 20 years old, but still remarkably popular with today's high school and college students.