I can tell you everybody I knew who had a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985: my neighbor Doug, my buddy Jason’s little brother Adam, my buddy Jeff’s aunt and uncle, and not long after that, Jeff’s family. At each one of those houses I remember playing Super Mario Bros.
I got my Commodore 64 in 1985, the best game playing home computer at the time. The Commodore 64 had great sound, great graphics, and many, many great games… but it didn’t have Super Mario Bros., something some of my Nintendo-owning friends reminded me of on more than one occasion.
Like all platform games, the goal of Super Mario Bros. is to move the player’s character — in this game, Mario or his brother Luigi — from the beginning of the level to the end of the level without getting him killed. There are a few ways to get killed: you can run into an enemy, fall through a pit, or get shot. Beating the first level isn’t that difficult and most people were able to master it pretty quickly.
Then you started finding the secrets.
While most of the pipes were simply part of the level’s structure, there were a few you could enter that led to secret rooms filled with coins! The mushrooms made you big! The flowers gave you the ability to shoot fireballs! 100 coins gave you an extra life!
Those weren’t even the good secrets. On the game’s second level, my neighbor showed me how you could trap a turtle and jump on him indefinitely, giving you hundreds of extra lives. There were hidden bricks; secrets, hidden within the levels that did magical things. Before long the game wasn’t about getting from the beginning of the level to the end at all — it was about finding all the little secrets hidden within. This was long before secrets spread at the speed of light across the internet — you either read them in a book or a magazine, learned them from a friend, or discovered them on your own.
Eventually, we Commodore owners did get our own Super Mario Bros. — kind of. In 1987 Rainbow Arts released The Great Giana Sisters (itself a close copy of Super Mario Bros.), which was soon modified to look like Super Mario Bros. As far as games go it was pretty good, but it wasn’t the Nintendo version.
There aren’t a lot of pack-in games that people have such fond memories of. Few people point to Combat or Pole Position II as their favorite games for the Atari 2600 or 7800 (respectively), but Super Mario Bros. was an instant classic — so much so that, 30 years later, here I am still writing about it. (Find someone who wrote 500 words about Pole Position II on its 30th anniversary, I dare ya.) Not only did it launch Nintendo into the stratosphere, but it created a long running series of games that continues today and turned Mario into one of the most iconic video game characters of all time. Nobody you know dressed up as Pole Position II for Halloween last year.
Not only did Super Mario Bros. add the words Goomba, Koopa Troopa, Piranha Plant and Hammer Brother to the vocabulary of children everywhere, but it permanently raised the bar of video games. No longer were we content with safely guiding characters from Point A to Point B. Not only did we want more out of our games; suddenly, we expected it.
Happy 30th birthday, Super Mario Bros. May you eat a thousand magic mushrooms and still be able to fit into your overalls.
