Classic Games revisited – Super Mario Bros.
Alan looks at just how Super this underdog plumber turned out to be…

Over the past few editions I have been revisiting classic games and assessing how well they have stood the test of time. This month I wanted to pay tribute to the Famicom - which celebrated its 40th anniversary in July 2023 (Ed. – “Wow - am I really that old?!”).The Famicom was Nintendo’s cartridge console for the third generation and was originally launched in Japan in 1983. It was then redesigned and re-launched as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for its roll out across the USA and then Europe during 1985-1987. Although slightly different machines, they did run the same 8-bit games, and with the help of Sega’s Master System they can claim significant credit for the explosion in the home gaming market in the late 1980s.  
 

In honour of the Famicom’s milestone birthday I will be talking about Super Mario Bros. - the game that changed gaming forever, became the must-have title for the NES and went on to break sales records for fun. 

 

Are you living in a cave?

It is hard to imagine that there could be anyone on the planet that hasn’t heard of Mario, and a brief venture into the murky world of the interweb only serves to confirm just how insanely popular Nintendo’s poster-boy has become. A bit of Googling directed me to a number of gaming sites that had compiled various charts, lists and polls. And you don’t need me to tell you where this is going…

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The most iconic video games character of all time? - Mario.

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The 25 most popular video game characters of all time? Number one was, yep, you guessed it - Mario.

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The video game character to appear in the most games? Once again, Mario sits on top of the pile, with an astonishing 275 game library under his belt, released for the various Nintendo consoles and handhelds dating back to the Game and Watch units from 1982.

 

Gaming royalty?

Created by Shigeru Miyamoto and voiced by Charles Martinet, Mario has become an undisputed legend of video gaming. And I would venture to suggest that it was Super Mario Bros. that really cemented his place in history.

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Mario made his original debut in the 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong, and then appeared in the single-screen wraparound arcade platform game Mario Bros. in 1983. But it was Super Mario Bros. that catapulted him into superstardom. The game was released for the Famicom in 1985 and on arcade machines and the NES in USA and Europe in 1986-1987. It didn’t just rewrite the gaming rule-book; it tore it up and started again, including many gameplay elements that we later took for granted but at the time were quite unusual, pretty special and brilliantly executed.
 

It helped pioneer side-scrolling platform games (it wasn’t the first – that honour goes to Jump Bug from 1981, but it was the first side scrolling platformer to achieve stratospheric popularity). It also made great use of hidden blocks and secrets, some of which were pretty mind-blowing for the time; none more so than the ability to jump outside of the apparent play area and run along the top of the screen to reach the warp-zones and other secret areas. The first time I achieved this I genuinely thought I’d found a bug in the game!
 

None of this was unique. Easter eggs had been regularly appearing in games since the 1970s (with Atari’s Adventure perhaps being the best known example). But combine them with flawless execution, slickness, and sheer playability and you have a game that became the undisputed killer-app for the Famicom and the NES.

 

Record breakers

Let’s talk sales for a moment, and we ought to - since the numbers are breathtaking. Even by today’s standards the figures are remarkable, but they are even more impressive when you consider that this is a release from almost 40 years ago – a time when home video gaming was proportionately more expensive and significantly less accessible than it is today. The original NES game sold over 40 million units by the year 2000. If we factor in ports and re-releases it is estimated that in excess of 58 million units have now sold worldwide. These numbers earned it a Guinness World Record as the best-selling video game of all time, and it carried this title proudly until it was finally dethroned by Wii Sports in 2006.

 

We all remember our first time…

I remember playing the game when it was first released in the United Kingdom. There was an arcade machine in the leisure centre where I used to play five-a-side football early on Sunday mornings. As I became increasingly proficient I had to get up earlier and earlier to allow sufficient time for my pre-match video gaming session, eventually arriving more than an hour before we were due to play to fit a full game in!
 

This was the first arcade machine I remember where coins bought time on the machine, rather than a specific number of credits, presumably because a skilled player could make a single game last an hour or more!

 

Confession time

However, I must confess that this is not really a true revisit. For this feature I will usually boot up a game that I haven’t played in years, to see if it is still as good as I remember or whether my memory is playing tricks on me. But I don’t need to revisit Super Mario Bros. because I still play it often. I keep returning to it, even now, simply because it is just so bloody good.

 

I don’t use this word often…

In fact good doesn’t do it justice. We are talking off-the-scale extraordinary. We are talking jaw-dropping exquisiteness. This is a game that changed an industry. The design, the gameplay, the difficulty, the learning curve, and the graphics and sound (for the time) are all perfect. And that is not a word I throw around with abandon. But it is, quite literally, gaming perfection. Give me the game and a magic wand and I would change nothing.
 

It is normal for a Pixel Addict game review to conclude with individual scores for Graphics, Sound, Grab Factor and Playability, along with a Verdict final score. But that would be pointless; they would all be 100%. I literally cannot fault it. When I review a platform game, even in 2023, I always compare it to Super Mario Bros. This game is my personal barometer for gameplay, my litmus test against which platform games will forever be measured. I have played a fair number over the years, with many Mario games among them (of course). But while they have grown in complexity and in later years have become increasingly impressive by throwing 3D and high definition graphics into the mix, none have nailed the gameplay experience quite as flawlessly as Super Mario Bros.
 

In a running feature last year, the editors of Pixel Addict voted Doom as the greatest classic video game of all time. When making the judgement, all sorts of factors were considered. Doom won through (against some astonishingly stiff competition) in part due to its role in history, by helping drive the popularity of network gaming and the first person shooter genre. And while it would be completely out of character for me to disagree with my fellow editors (Ed. – “Stop it Grapes – you are killing me!”), if I am rating straightforward pickup-and-play gaming genius, Super Mario Bros. takes the crown. Classic video gaming simply does not get any better. 
 

A belated happy birthday Famicom. And thank you.

AG August 2023

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Featured in Pixel Addict magazine, issue 15.

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© Words and pictures copyright grapeswriting.com

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