In my comfortable study, surrounded by the latest gaming consoles and a seemingly infinite number of games, I can’t help but feel nostalgic. Of all the newfangled amusements that fill this room, there’s really only one that got me started on this pathway. And I find it ironic that, even though I’m working with all the up-to-date gear, it’s still good ol’ “Super Mario Bros.” that remains one of the most important games to me. And I’d like to think that, as a flagship game that spent a long time at the top of sales charts, it remains a beacon for a lot of kids. But first, I’ve got to tell you why “Super Mario Bros.” is so freaking important—why it’s not just any good step on this pathway. Why it’s a good start, you might say.
My inaugural interaction with “Super Mario Bros.” is burned into my memory with astounding vividness—a richness of color and contour unique to the imprints of an unalloyed and unimpeachable joy. The mid-1980s had arrived, and video gaming—an economic endeavor very much still in its infancy—was just starting to work its tendrils not only into the national consciousness but also into kid society, making us the first generation raised more by consoles and cartridges than by the Saturday-morning mathematics of the 1-2-3s and 4-5-6s that reliably produced grown-ups.
That Saturday afternoon remains etched in my memory. I can still feel the bike ride’s breeze on the way to my friend Tom’s house. I was filled with a buzz of anticipation; the energy seemed to crackle around me. By contrast, when I entered his living room, all was still and quiet. It was then that I caught sight of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Tom was plugging away at it with his controller, the TV filled with beautiful pixels. And there was the beauty of the NES’s 8-bit world—unlike anything I had ever seen before.
When Tom passed the controller to me, a shiver of intensity shot through my veins. The not-oft-held rectangular NES controller was new to me, yet it assumed an air of familiarity in my grasp. Between the promises that any button might offer, and the iconic status of the theme song from “Super Mario Bros.”, I was thrilled to have a go on the console. I was then caught up in a ruse of simplicity. The game lead you to believe that you could play it merely by understanding the basic mechanics of running right and jumping.
In many ways, “Super Mario Bros.” was a pioneering game, but for me, it was the gameplay that was and is truly enthralling. The controls were so simple, intuitive, and engaging that the most lead-footed player of any previous game could instantly understand—what was effectively a two-button control interface, with the “A” button for jumping and the “B” button for running (or shooting fireballs). The levels—the individual building blocks of the larger world—were so exquisitely and deviously designed that they pulled the player in and helped to spell a kind of diabolical magic that SMB has over so many of us. And that was especially true in my case.
The first level—World 1-1—still fills me with the sort of amazement that I imagine our earliest ancestors must have felt when they first started using tools. The level is a tutorial in under six minutes; as you reach the flagpole at the end, you’ve had an opportunity to do pretty much everything you’ll be doing in the levels to come. The one thing you haven’t done is die. I’ve always loved that if you don’t read the instruction manual (and I didn’t when I was eight, for the most part), you can learn World 1-1’s lessons by just playing it a single time.
For hours on end, Tom and I would play the same game in an attempt to outdo each other. The slight breeze of rivalry that emerged from these sessions was enough to push both of us to our best abilities. It was indeed a trying time for any writer bound by the rules of grammar and syntax, and you can read the second half of this sentence as proof of that. Nonetheless, and in a much cheerier way, we looked at the whole ordeal as a time for great bonding. Beating Bowser was awesome, and you can write that down.
Players of “Super Mario Bros.” were led on an expedition through the bizarre Mushroom Kingdom. Which other game would let you jump into a painting hanging on the wall to access an alternate world? And yet, the series’ makers didn’t seem content with what I consider the best 3D “Mario” title to date. In 2007, they put the same “Mario” mustard on an awkward isometric game that tragically missed the genius of “Super Mario 64” while largely recapturing its geometric spirit.
I really favored World 2-1, where I think we had underground sections for the first time. Exchanging the uppercase world for the dark, poor-lit underground was really compelling to me. You could just see what the underground sections had by their shift in color. The coins went from really rigid and bright to something that was in the tune of the environment. And once again, in the underground sections, Koji Kondo’s orchestra was hard at work making some more memorable compositions.
Next came the notorious water levels, conferring a whole new set of problems. The controls were funky, and you could barely see Mario as he paddled about. You had to press a button to keep him afloat while working your way through treacherous underwater passageways. Anytime you had to go up or down, you could just barely make out the directional path you were supposed to take, while under constant assault from enemy fish and other creatures. But the enemies didn’t kill you outright. Oh, no. Instead, they bumped you around until you lost your coins, broke your power-up bricks, or, worst of all, knocked you into pits. Mario was invincible, but only if you let him win with a certain amount of dignity.
At the end of each world, we came to the castles. They were always a little bit serious, a little bit stalwart, and the atmosphere only got tenser as we climbed all the way to the top, got through the ship compartments, hiked around the ship’s edges, or sometimes went below to come back up and go back down. We had to do all that because we couldn’t just get to the end of the world in one piece and live to tell the tale. Beating the castle was the culmination of the world’s achievement.
Super Mario Bros. was not only a private pursuit but also a shared experience. For my friends back in the day, it was something that we’d not only play together after school, but also talk about the next day at lunch, and again on the following ride home. After school and phone conversations, the only things my friends had to do with me that the moment of character for the two Plumbers cassette experience had nothing to do with the online internet culture of the separation for Teams online as in Team Fortress 2 or Paladins. Oh, yeah, and this was all before Minecraft!
The thrill of finding the warp zones for the first time is something I’ll never forget. It was like finding buried treasure—honest-to-goodness Eureka! moments that we shared with one another. My brother, naturally, was the first to stumble upon this crazy hidden stuff in Super Mario Bros. He was always doing that, in every game we played. He’d share these moments of discovery and what often felt like gamesmanship with me, but with the same result: We had just made our way through the final three levels of Super Mario Bros. and we hadn’t broken any top-secret AGENCY codes to do it!
My family joined the fun, too. My younger sister, who generally paid more attention to her playthings and art supplies, found herself oddly enamored with the game. She and I took turns. I gave her some pointers, some wordless looks of nearly bursting enthusiasm, as she ascended into the sheer vertical space of the second Dreamscape. We stayed in the dormant volcano, through the nighttime forest, and out into the snowbound plain, for the good of the kingdom identified in the eponymous title.
The game Super Mario Bros. was more than just a game; it was a cultural phenomenon. Mario, the lead character, was not just a character, but also a symbol that the mustached men that make New York click, recognized around the world. The narrative was formed, while the appeal to the narrative was in its creative, innovative, visual form; and in the audio overlay. Aesthetics played a significant role in the formation of the first impression of Super Mario Bros. By the time the player had hit the second screen, the developers at that player’s nerve endings had already done the work in inducing that player to feel connected to the appearance of a brand-new world.
Also of note is the music of Super Mario Bros., which has become almost as famous as the game itself. Kondo Koji’s original score is featured in over a dozen games and is beloved by fans for its upbeat and memorable melodies. The opening theme of World 1-1 is so famous, and so well-designed, that it has been the subject of scholarly analysis. Indeed, music theorists have written essays about how almost all of the melodies in ‘Super Mario Bros.’ work and fit together in simple and yet satisfying ways.
Mario was all over, making my friends and me lose our minds over Super Show episodes and a thousand different branded items. We thought we were part of a semi-secret society. Nintendo’s advertisement even proclaimed, “It’s a Mario thing!”
One of the most successful and enduring franchises in the history of video games was launched with a foundation set by Super Mario Bros. What’s even more impressive is that the game design and the innovative gameplay of the 1985 original have held up to this day. When looking back at just why this development and the series it spawned have been so successful, I consistently find several reasons for it.
In 1988, Super Mario Bros. 3 hit the market and promptly showed the world exactly what was possible with an 8-bit console. What happened? The revolution starts with the protagonist, Mario, and culminates in a larger-than-life journey into the Mushroom World. Mario fighting his enemies in the open (Super Mario Bros.) and Mario navigating his makeshift cave shelter (Super Mario Bros. 2) were just the overture to a far grander adventure. In Super Mario Bros. 3, the protagonist can now defeat his enemies by taking on beast-like appearances while navigating the Mushroom World. You might remember Mario donning a raccoon suit and flying around (Super Leaf) or dressing up like a statue (Tanooki Suit) while moving around inside and outside subterranean and tree-top levels.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System game Super Mario World led the pack and redefined the side-scrolling, platform-jumping genre that got its start in Donkey Kong. SMW served up colorful, kooky worlds and seriously tight design; nearly every level contained secrets of the type that kept obsessive children (like me) stuck to the television for hours on end. And instead of thanks for playing, beating the game unlocked even more levels. This game had deep, deep roots, and the sheer fun of playing it (and arguing about it with my friends) sealed its classic status for me.
A standout recollection of mine with Super Mario Bros. is set during a summer visitation by my cousins. We decided to have a little gaming contest between us. We weren’t the best of friends, always bickering about something, but we were familial, so life had a way of going on. We created a sort of faux tournament scenario with a small prize at the end for the winner. We set up a sheet of poster board as a visual representation of a leaderboard with the understanding that when someone did well, they’d go up and replace the current top player on the board.
I have a distinct image in my mind from when I was a child. In it, Mark and I are sitting down in front of my 46-inch CRT TV illuminated by soft rays of orange lamplight. The curtains of my living room are closed. We’re shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back, enraptured in a showdown for the ages. His eyes are locked on the screen; mine are, too. Ever since I could remember, we were always given to silly competitive moments, free of ego but full of familial fun. Who can eat that chip more dramatically or who can finish that soft drink faster? Or, on this summer evening in 2001, who can spend the next half-hour attempting, again and again, to make it through the final three rooms of Super Mario Bros. 3?
A moment that stands out in my memory is the first time I finished the entirety of the Super Mario Bros. game without utilizing a single warp zone. The game was difficult—it was designed for players to lose, in the hopes that those losses would turn into the sales of additional quarters so the arcade machine owners could make even more money. That the experience was meditative for Brian reveals something essential about the nature of the games that both Miyamoto and Petersen swear by: They operate under certain principles that give them the illusion of being “solvable,” like a puzzle. And when gamers play in “the zone,” with the right combination of relaxation and focus, it’s as if they’re working to solve the problems in real time, using the combination of intuition and reasoning that Petersen calls judgment.
Super Mario Bros. has an enormous, wide-reaching legacy. It completely remade the gaming landscape and has, I think, affected society and world culture to about the same extent as its greatest artistic predecessors. And what’s more, it has done that mostly through inspiration. By showing all the games that came afterward just how many more possibilities were available within this landscape than had been imagined before.
The video game industry was in bad shape in 1983, but Super Mario Bros. helped turn it around. Its success took the industry from a low point back to a high point and with that came a bunch of revived interest in console technologies and video games. Serving as an incendiary to the kindling of the industry’s recovery, Super Mario Bros. can take a lot of the credit for helping video games once again become a pop cultural medium with a tremendous following in the late 1980s.
Additionally Super Mario Bros. holds a unique position in the affection of video game players all over the globe. The game is an emblem of the period of innocence and marvel that we first experienced in this medium, when we were content in the virtual simplicity of a new world—something that seemed as magical to us as the wardrobe that led to Narnia. At the time, Super Mario Bros. was more than just a game that asked you to control a digital character. It was a virtual challenge that teased and tickled your brain in various ways, mesmerizing and entrancing your imagination for the sum total of its many parts. Did you know that the original Japanese version of the game was released on floppy disk? And that it was, at the time, the first video game ever to be designed on a home computer?
Looking back over the hours and hours I spent engrossed in the adventures of Super Mario Bros., I am filled with an overwhelming sense of thankfulness. That is because I realize now that the time I played that game did not constitute a wasted youth. Rather, it was time spent in what I have come to understand as a vital period of personal formation. You have to hand it to Super Mario Bros., Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and the rest—they were enthralling. Why? Because they set up and ignited in me a lifelong passion for video games.
Super Mario Bros. taught me many important values, and I carry those with me to this day. It taught me to keep ever at it, to exhaust the many possible iterations of a situation. And when I do something that I think is the only way to move forward in this existence, to keep at it until I think I have it right. I might not have a very positive attitude right now, but I know that I can change that, as long as I have life and breath. Super Mario Bros. is a game of infinite life; indeed, as long as I can keep on “Mmm …-ing,” I know I will be okay.
Decades have passed, and still, I return to play Super Mario Bros. time and again. The enchanting simplicity and alluring charisma of that game are unforgettable. Whenever I fire it up, it’s like reacquainting with a familiar, dependable buddy who used to crack me up. For the duration of every playthrough, I am again a delighted child. Its hold over me remains tenacious and tethered in first knowledge, that it was my first game.
Even now, Super Mario Bros. is making a difference; one could argue that it has never really left the public conscience. What started as a bright idea and a tiny team of passionate individuals has grown into a behemoth of a franchise that expands with every new title. The series, as a whole, not only shows what it’s capable of but also makes very clear that it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. From the very first game in the series, the creative foundation was built to support an entire spinoff of groundbreaking games.
The fact that Mario and his adventures are still beloved speaks volumes about the genius of Shigeru Miyamoto and the world he created (with a little help from his friends, of course). But for me, there’s one detail in particular that sets him apart from just about every other beloved character in popular culture—video games and otherwise. As the great Internet Thinker Baratunde Thurston once put it, Mario is almost unique in being both “mind-blowingly generic and yet intensely specific at the same time”.
Super Mario Bros. is the game that started my lifelong love affair with video games. Before I played it, my only understanding of them was the half-kid, half-grown-up fairytale world they represented, a world where kids like me could become something completely different. But when I played “Super Mario Bros., I experienced the universe where anyone could live inside their dreams, and from that moment on, I was hooked.
And now, even at a time when technology has grown immeasurably beyond what it was in the mid-’80s, I’m still playing these games, and at this stage, I’m at the point where I can honestly say I’ve probably lost more time to Super Mario Bros. and its direct sequels than to any other form of human entertainment.
The extraordinarily rich history of video games has Super Mario Bros. as its centerpiece. It is a monument to the countless hours a twentysomething Shigeru Miyamoto and his tomorrow thinkers logged into creating every last second of not just the first Super Mario masterpiece but its many, many sequels, too. The original game is an innocent piece of the puzzle for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, yet the making of that masterpiece and its illusion of kickoff time opened secret doors.
When I think back to my time with Super Mario Bros., I feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. The game felt almost magical to me, conjuring up a world of wonders and full of excitement. My brother and I were great friends of the game, lending each other the necessary backup on especially tough levels. Looking back now, I realize I had some genuinely fantastic — and fantastical — experiences with the game.
Super Mario Bros. truly was the first of its kind. To this day, I revere it as the video game that was able to usually make something new happen every screen length. (And I’ve finished it enough times in my life to feel like I’ve witnessed its new every.) It used Action and Puzzle Phases. It was in large part a video game that worked because it was based on solid, simple mechanics that had been seen before in other popular video games that we loved. But how many of us had ever played something with better mechanics? I know I couldn’t help feeling this way, that I was playing the best video game I’d ever seen by comparison with what I or anybody else in my family had loved before. And who am I to feel this way against anybody else’s opinion? All I can do is respect those memories and keep them alive for as long as they continue to be of use.
