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Matt takes an extensive look at Mario’s first console outing, Super Mario Bros.

Mario Becomes Super

If you put Super Mario Bros. side-by-side with early-gen Nintendo games, you would notice just how advanced the game felt from other games Nintendo made. While Super Mario Bros. looks simple by today’s standards, its quality was ten times higher then many of the other launch titles that came with the NES. Comparing them to Super Mario Bros, you would see there was no contest: Mario was easily the winner. It would take six years for Nintendo (and to an extent Sega but in four years time) to reach arcade level graphics for home consoles with the advent of Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. Yes, Super Mario Bros. looks very simple compared to its follow-ups.

While the NES does have a limited color palette, it should be noted that at the time of this game’s development Miyamoto and his team were still trying to figure out how to make do with the Famicom’s architecture. Mario doesn’t look like the plumber we all know and love, for better or worse, but he’s still recognizable. In fact, the entire game isn’t that much of a looker. Mario’s later outings on the NES (mainline and otherwise) were much more colorful and really took the NES’ limited graphic palette to work. With Super Mario Bros. expect to see a lot of brown with a blue or black background. Thankfully, the enemies themselves stand out against the background colors and really pop out, making them easily identifiable.

While the game doesn’t look that great, it plays like a dream. Mario was the first Nintendo side-scroller that felt extremely fluid. Momentum and physics were key to reaching the goal, and the entire game itself is designed around it. You know that first level, World 1-1? You could (and can) probably beat it in less then 30 seconds, but that is only after you have memorized the levels in and out. Every stage within Super Mario Bros. is a unique experience, and they never feel the same. Ok, almost never. A couple of the stages in later worlds are remixed versions of previous levels, only the remix in question is just more of the same enemy or a new one thrown into the mix. While this might put off some people, the game’s most notorious flaw is its limited amount of exploration. Side-scrolling Mario games give each stage a time limit, but the game designers put a lot of thought into where the secrets are and the amount of time each stage is given; you can find all secrets within the set time length, but Super Mario Bros. has this grating feature that prevents players from backtracking to a level already completed to look for things they may have missed. This is by far the most infuriating thing I find with this game, and thankfully it has never appeared in Mario games since (with only two exceptions, one was an easter egg in New Super Mario Bros. DS and another was Super Mario Land).

One of the most innovative elements Super Mario Bros. introduced is the power-up system. With a lot of arcade games back in the day, dying in one hit was normal. In Super Mario Bros. you only die when you are small Mario. After grabbing a Super Mushroom you become Super Mario; if you hit an enemy you'll revert back to small Mario instead of dying. Fire Flowers, another staple of the Mario series, give Mario the power to throw fireballs and is incredibly useful in more than a few instances (why hello there Spinies and Lakitu). Coins, hidden in “?” blocks and normal blocks dotted around every single level don’t serve any real purpose unless you like 1-ups and an extra 200 points to your score.

Items, however, are like a double-edged sword if used improperly. Super Mario is two block sizes in height, and he can break blocks with a jump, but in order to move under a set a blocks in, say, World 1-2, he needs to run and duck. This can be fun and also dangerous, because there are always hazards in each world like Goombas and Koopa Troopas. Being small Mario can give you easy clearance, but you are still in danger. This, as with every other Mario game (sans the 3-D ones) gives a sense of caution and accomplishment. Coins and 1-up mushrooms can give you extra lives in order to avoid the dreaded game over screen. Though to be honest, this is possibly the easiest Mario game out of the NES trilogy.

But at the end of the day, Super Mario Bros. is legendary. Long before Wii Sports usurped its place as “Best Selling Game Ever,” it had sold over forty million copies and made the NES brand a household name. Not to mention all the ports it has been given over the years.

Yes, ports.

As of this writing, there have been five ports released in North America over the last two decades. You have got the Super Mario All-Stars SNES cartridge and Wii disc, the Game Boy Color port, a basic Game Boy Advance ROM dump, and a virtual console release.