Retro Redux: Super Mario Bros.

With the recent passing of Nintendo’s 120th birthday I thought it only appropriate to discuss the game that is credited with giving them the most success. Mario had been around for a few years before this game, but it wasn’t until he switched professions from carpenter to plumber, and Bowser decided to kidnap a princess that he got his biggest claim to fame. Super Mario Bros. released in 1985 was probably the biggest title of that decade and arguably the most popular title of all-time. The game introduced the Mushroom Kingdom onto an unsuspecting world and those characters have been with us ever since.

This game was definitely a product of its time and has created the most iconic character ever to grace a home console or handheld. Mario was created the way he was because of the limitations of the system. He wears a hat because his creator, Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t know how to animate hair very well. He has a moustache because without it, it would have been hard to recognize his facial features and he wears overalls because without it his arms would have blended in with the rest of his body. They may have been unique and unintended design choices, but without them Mario might not have been the character he is today.

In Super Mario Bros. our hero sets out on a quest to rescue Princess Toadstool, who is also known as Princess Peach, from the clutches of the evil Koopa King Bowser. He must journey through eight different parts of the Mushroom Kingdom, only to find at the end of each world that the Princess is “in another castle”. Along the way he must defeat the minions of Bowser; the Koopa Troopas, Goomba, Piranha Plants and more. The world of the Mushroom Kingdom is littered with platforms, huge chasms, vines and more. It brought us the genre known as the platformer and set the stage for hundreds of games that would follow. There were coins to collect, secret items hidden in a number of different places. It even featured multiple paths through some of the levels if you found a hidden vine.
The actual gameplay mechanic of running and jumping has been tried in many games since Super Mario Bros. and many of those games will be compared to it, even today. The jumping mechanic was about as perfect as it could have been. You were able to control the length of Mario’s jump by how long you pressed the A button on the NES controller. He always seemed to jump just right. It didn’t feel too floaty and out of control, but it wasn’t as tight as Mega Man. The designers created what could be the sweet spot of the video game jump. Even years later it’s very easy to load up Mario and speed through the levels because you know just exactly how the game controls.

Visually it brought games into an era that, at least in my opinion, is one of the best in the history of video games. For the first time, at home, players were able to without having to stretch their imaginations see what was on screen and recognize it instantly. The blocks that made up the characters were so good you could distinguish features in a way that wasn’t possible on the home consoles from Atari and others. Super Mario Bros. has some of the most iconic characters ever created and their designs haven’t changed much since that time because they were so good. Koopa Troopas and Goombas look today exactly like what you would expect if they had depth to them. The 2-D worlds created by Nintendo back then were some of the best and continue to develop as the years go by.

Super Mario Bros. was, for a long time, the best selling console game ever. It was only recently surpassed by another Nintendo franchise, Wii Sports.Throughout its many different iterations, Super Mario Bros. has sold over 40 million copies world wide and it’s quite possible to walk into any gamers house and find multiple copies of the game on a number of different platforms. There hasn’t been a Nintendo console or handheld released that doesn’t have some version of Super Mario Bros. and I think it’s simply because people enjoy playing the game. I know even today there’s probably not a week goes by that I don’t play through it at least once. It takes about 15 minutes on a casual play through if you’ve played it as often as many of us have.

This is just a quick look back at a game millions of gamers have played, probably billions of times. There’s not much about Super Mario Bros. to say that hasn’t been said before. It’s simply one of the greatest games ever created and holds up wonderfully to this day. New generations of gamers are experiencing this classic every day and it’s well worth playing, even now.