Now we're talking.
58 lives at the end of stage 2. 
Gotta love that leaf. 

I *love* the design of Mario 3. Everything about it is super-cool. The map layouts are nice, the design of the levels is still great today. There are *tons* of secrets in this game. If you have a certain number of coins and your score has a certain digit at the fifth spot, and you end a level with a certain time, the hammer brothers turn into a big coin ship. I've done it maybe four or five times. I love the item game, too. Everything looks super cool. Oh, and the goomba's shoe? How cool is that? A giant wind-up shoe. So fun.
I don't even want to guess how long it'll take me to beat this game. It took, what? A little over 3 hours to beat the last one? Yeash.