 |
Release Date: October 1985 U.S.
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developer: Nintendo EAD Publisher: Nintendo License: Commercial Availability: Virtual Console, eBay Series: Mario |
Plot:
The vicious King Koopa (later renamed Bowser) has kidnapped Princess Toadstool and it’s up to the brothers Mario – Mario Mario and Luigi Mario if the usual naming conventions hold up – to save her from certain turtly doom. Questions such as how Princess Toadstool came to be sovereign of a nation populated by sentient turtles and mushrooms, what King Koopa’s actual claim to the monarchy is, what a vicious dragon-turtle could possibly want to do with a kidnapped human female, why two Italian plumbers are inexplicably tossed into the middle of this mad situation, and why the main antagonist thought it was a good idea to liberally sprinkle his fortresses with pipes when the main protagonists are plumbers are never properly addressed in the game manual.
But it is one of the most influential video games of all time coming from a time period when plot was either nonexistent or a pile of garbled Engrish, so we can cut it a bit of slack.
Gameplay:
Super Mario Bros. is a two-player sidescrolling platformer where players take control of one of the two brothers Mario and navigate them past the various hazards presented in the Mushroom Kingdom. Level progression is linear from left to right with no option to backtrack. The game consists of eight worlds with four levels per world. Progression through the worlds is also mostly linear, though players can jump to later worlds by finding secret “Warp Zone” pipes hidden throughout the levels.
Single player mode finds players guiding Mario through the Mushroom Kingdom with five lives to start. In two-player mode a player continues play until they die at which point the other player gets a turn, making it entirely possible for more experienced players to pull the dick move of a total lockout if they’re so inclined. Please note that it isn’t advisable to attempt a lockout when playing with a significant other unless you want a brief return to the days when you had enough time to perfect the lockout due to all the sex you weren’t having.
Legacy
The original Super Mario Bros. for the NES can justifiably be called one of the most influential games of all time and the granddaddy of the modern video game industry. It was the killer app that made the NES a must-have piece of hardware in the states. And that must-have status is what helped boost flagging video game sales after the great video game crash of the mid-’80s. I won’t hyperbolize to the lengths that some game journalists have and claim that without Mario and the NES there would be no video games today – those claims are always made by console fans who largely ignore that the PC gaming market was chugging alon quite nicely through the crash and beyond – but without the NES it is likely that the console gaming market would have been set back a few years; assuming it wasn’t completely overshadowed by the Internet-fueled ubiquity of the PC in the mid-’90s.
Super Mario Brothers also cemented many of the platforming mechanics that would come to dominate the industry well into the ’90s. Some changes, such as the introduction of smooth sidescrolling and powerups, were major shifts compared to how platformers had been designe up to that point. Other design choices were subtle but no less revolutionary such as the ability to change the direction of a jump mid-air or the subtle level design choices that made it possible for more experienced players to pull off elegant speed runs.
And it’s that sense of subtle but deliberate design and a genre-defining attention to detail that’s the ultimate legacy of Super Mario Brothers. Mario wasn’t the first platformer, but it was the first platformer to get all of the game mechanics down so perfectly that every little kid in Japan and the U.S. had to have a copy of the game. Nintendo would take that design philosophy to greater levels with each subsequent 2D Mario release, and then use it to completely redefine the way video games were played again when their plucky plumber made the transition to 3D with Mario 64 a decade after his initial debut.
The Mario franchise has turned into the cornerstone of the Nintendo empire in the years since Super Mario Brothers. But with all the remakes, rereleases, reimaginings, and switches to different genres, sometimes it’s fun to just go back to the simple sidescrolling 8-bit platformer that started it all and jump your way down memory lane leaving a trail of goomba and koopa corpses behind.
Comments