Getting Mario Back into the Gym: Setting up Super Mario Bros. in OpenAI's gym

It's been a few years since I was first exposed to reinforcement learning. What got me into it was seeing this video that had trained a neural network to play Mario. As someone who grew up playing Mario, seeing deep learning being applied to something I knew so well seemed to provided the perfect introduction to the topic. Sadly though, the project was written using Torch, and I was still a naive young programmer. I didn't get too far along before the frustrations with learning lua lead me to give up, and just focus on other projects instead.