Christmas morning, 1985. My dad had worked his usual night shift as a security guard at the mall, but instead of going straight to bed when he got home around 4 AM, he’d stayed up to set up a surprise. When I came downstairs in my He-Man pajamas, rubbing sleep from my eyes, there it was under the tree: a Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with Super Mario Bros.
I’d seen Nintendo at my friend Bobby’s house a few weeks earlier and had talked about nothing else since. Bobby’s family was always the first to get new gadgets—they had a VCR when the rest of us were still watching whatever happened to be on TV, a microwave when my mom was still reheating things in the oven, and now this magical gray box that let you control what happened on the screen. My parents weren’t big on technology (my dad still had an 8-track player in his Oldsmobile), so I never expected them to get me one.
But there it was. Dad looked exhausted but pleased with himself as my brother Dave and I freaked out. Mom made coffee and watched with an expression somewhere between amusement and concern, probably already calculating how this would affect our TV time. Within minutes, Dad had it hooked up to our ancient Zenith television with the wood-panel sides and the finicky vertical hold that required occasional slapping to fix.
And then, that music started. Dun dun dun-dun dun DUN! Simple, catchy, perfect. The title screen showed this mustached man in red, and when Dad handed me the controller—a flat, rectangular thing that felt enormous in my seven-year-old hands—I pressed start with a sense of reverence usually reserved for church.
That first level of Super Mario Bros. is etched into my brain more permanently than my own phone number. The brick layout, the question blocks, the positioning of every Goomba—it’s all still there, accessible instantly like some kind of muscle memory flashback. I can close my eyes right now and mentally play through World 1-1 with perfect accuracy, hearing every sound effect and musical note.
My first attempt was predictably disastrous. I died on the first Goomba—a humiliation my brother never let me forget. “You’re supposed to jump ON them, dummy,” Dave helpfully explained, grabbing for the controller. But Dad, in a rare intervention against big brother privilege, said I should get another try. Second attempt: made it past the Goomba but fell into a pit. Third try: discovered the mushroom that made Mario grow big, which blew my mind. By my fifth or sixth go, I’d made it to the flagpole at the end of the level, and the basement erupted in cheers like I’d just won the Super Bowl.
My obsession was immediate and all-consuming. Every day after school, I’d race home, throw my backpack on the kitchen table, grab a handful of Oreos, and head straight to the basement to play. My mom instituted a “homework first” policy that lasted exactly two days before I figured out I could just lie about having homework. (Sorry, Mom. The statute of limitations on that one has probably expired by now.)
What struck me about Super Mario Bros., even back then, was how perfectly it controlled. Mario’s movement had weight to it—a certain momentum that felt natural. If you ran and then stopped, he’d slide a little. Jump while running, and you’d go farther. Small hop or big leap, it all depended on how long you held the button. It sounds simple now, but in 1985, this kind of nuanced control scheme was revolutionary. Previous games I’d played at the arcade or on my cousin’s Atari felt stiff in comparison. Mario moved like you’d expect a cartoon plumber to move, if cartoon plumbers could jump five times their own height.
The precision required for certain jumps taught me patience I didn’t know I had. There was this gap in World 8-1 that gave me fits—a simple jump between two platforms with a Koopa Troopa patrolling. I failed it so many times that my dad, walking through the basement on his way to do laundry, stopped to watch. “You’re overthinking it,” he said, in a rare moment of gaming insight from a man who still couldn’t program our VCR. “Just run and jump.” He was right, of course. Sometimes the simplest approach worked best.
The hidden secrets in Super Mario Bros. created this sense of wonder and discovery that modern games with their waypoints and objective markers can’t replicate. The first time I accidentally discovered that certain bricks could be broken by jumping into them as Super Mario, I felt like I’d hacked the game somehow. Then came the warp pipes—green tubes that would transport you to different areas. Some went down to coin-filled rooms. Others shot you up to previously inaccessible platforms. The game rewarded exploration and experimentation in ways that taught me to question the apparent limits of any system—a mindset that later served me well in both gaming and life.
And then there were the warp zones, the holy grail of Super Mario Bros. secrets. I first heard about them from Kevin, the kid at school who always knew all the gaming tips (in retrospect, he definitely had a subscription to Nintendo Power). “If you go above the ceiling in World 1-2,” he said during lunch period, lowering his voice like he was sharing nuclear launch codes, “you can find pipes that take you straight to later worlds.”
I didn’t believe him. Go above the ceiling? That sounded like one of those playground myths, like how Luigi was supposedly playable if you did some elaborate sequence of button presses. But that afternoon, I tried it. At the end of World 1-2, I found I could jump on an elevator platform, then leap above where the ceiling should be, run across the top of the level, and discover a hidden room with pipes labeled as warps to Worlds 2, 3, and 4.
My mind. Was. Blown.
This wasn’t just a cool shortcut—it fundamentally changed how I thought about video games. The rules weren’t as fixed as they appeared. The designers had hidden these secrets for players to discover, creating a meta-game of exploration beyond the main objective. From that moment on, I began trying to break boundaries in every game I played, looking for the hidden paths, the unintended strategies, the secrets lurking just beyond the obvious.
The legendary Minus World glitch took this to another level. Again, it was Kevin who told me about it—how if you did a precise wall-clip in the same warp zone area of World 1-2, you could access a bizarre, unfinished level called “World -1” (displayed as “World 1-1” in the game, but we all called it Minus World). When I finally pulled it off after dozens of attempts, finding myself in an underwater level that looped endlessly, I felt like I’d peeked behind the curtain of how games were made. This wasn’t an intentional secret; it was an actual programming oversight, a glimpse into the imperfect, human process of game development.
The technical achievements of Super Mario Bros. within the severe limitations of the NES hardware are still impressive today. The entire game fit on a cartridge with just 40KB of program code—that’s about 0.00004 GB. For comparison, a single photo taken on my current phone is often 5,000 times larger. Within that tiny space, Shigeru Miyamoto and his team created 32 distinctive levels, each with different enemy patterns, architectural challenges, and secrets. They built an entire universe of mushroom people, walking turtles, and angry sentient bullets out of pixels you could practically count individually.
The difference between Super Mario Bros. and the original arcade Mario Bros. was striking. The arcade game, which I’d played at the local Pizza Hut, was a simple single-screen affair where Mario and Luigi knocked enemies over and then kicked them away. Fun, but limited. Super Mario Bros. took that character and placed him in a scrolling world full of variety and imagination. It was like comparing stick figures to a Pixar movie—both technically drawings, but worlds apart in ambition and execution.
Miyamoto’s design philosophy shone through every aspect of the game. Rather than explicitly tutorializing mechanics, Super Mario Bros. taught through level design. World 1-1 is a masterclass in this approach. It introduces you to jumping, to enemies, to power-ups, to pipes, to blocks—all without a single word of instruction. The Goomba is placed specifically so that most players will either jump over it or land on it accidentally, teaching the basic stomp mechanic. The first mushroom is positioned to almost run into you, making it likely you’ll collect it even if you’re trying to avoid it. These weren’t random choices; they were deliberate decisions to guide player learning through experience rather than explanation.
My speedrunning attempts began early, though we didn’t call it that back then. My friends and I would time each other with the kitchen timer, seeing who could finish the game fastest (using warps, obviously—we weren’t that patient). My personal best was around 9 minutes, which I thought was godlike until years later when I discovered that professional speedrunners could finish it in under 5 minutes. Still, those competitions taught me to optimize, to find the perfect path, to execute with precision. Every frame mattered, every button press had to be exact. I didn’t realize it then, but this was training me in skills that would later apply to everything from typing to driving to how I approach problems at work.
As I got better at the game, I started setting artificial challenges for myself. Beat the game without using warp zones. Beat it without getting a single coin. Beat it without taking damage (this one I never managed). My favorite was trying to finish with the timer as close to zero as possible without dying—a surprisingly difficult challenge that required precise knowledge of how long each section took. I’d get to the flagpole with 3 seconds left, heart pounding like I’d just run a marathon.
The music deserves special mention. Composed by Koji Kondo, the Super Mario Bros. soundtrack did more with three channels of audio than most modern games do with orchestral scores. The main theme is so iconic that people who’ve never touched a controller in their lives can recognize it. The underwater theme with its waltz-like rhythm created a perfect sense of buoyancy. The castle theme with its menacing tempo made my palms sweat before I’d even encountered a single Podoboo (those bouncing fireballs). Kondo understood that music wasn’t just background—it was an essential component of the emotional experience.
My relationship with Super Mario Bros. evolved over the years. When Super Mario Bros. 2 came out, I was initially confused by its different mechanics (picking up enemies instead of stomping them?) and strange new characters (what was a Shy Guy?). Later I learned it had originally been a completely different game in Japan, retrofitted with Mario characters for the American market. Super Mario Bros. 3 blew my mind all over again with its world map, its suits, its seemingly endless variety. But I always came back to the original. There was a purity to it, a perfect balance of simplicity and depth.
My original NES eventually wore out—too many cartridge insertions, too many frustrated blowing sessions trying to get dusty contacts to work. My mom suggested it might be time to “move on to other things” (meaning “go outside occasionally”), but of course I saved up for a replacement. By then the Super Nintendo was already out, but I still wanted to be able to play the game that started it all.
In college, I brought my NES to the dorm, where it became a center of social activity. People who’d never played classic Nintendo were baffled by the primitive graphics but quickly became addicted to the gameplay. My roommate Mark, a non-gamer who mainly focused on his engineering studies, went from mocking my “children’s toy” to staying up until 3 AM trying to beat World 8-4. “This game is ridiculous,” he’d say, dying for the twentieth time to one of Bowser’s hammers. “Just one more try.”
The legacy of Super Mario Bros. in my gaming life is immeasurable. It established my expectations for tight controls, thoughtful level design, and hidden depth. It taught me that the best games respect player intelligence rather than holding your hand. When I play modern games with their excessive tutorials, unskippable cutscenes, and constant objective reminders, I sometimes long for the elegant simplicity of being dropped into World 1-1 with nothing but three lives and your wits.
I’ve played through Super Mario Bros. on numerous platforms over the decades—the original NES, the SNES Super Mario All-Stars version with updated graphics, various Game Boy iterations, the Wii Virtual Console, the Switch Online service. The muscle memory remains perfect across all of them. I could probably play through World 1-1 blindfolded at this point. Sometimes I boot it up just to experience that familiar flow state, the perfect sync between brain, hands, and game that comes from decades of repetition.
My collection of Mario memorabilia has grown embarrassingly large over the years. Figurines, plush toys, t-shirts, even a shower curtain with the original level design that my ex-girlfriend called “juvenile” (a critique that may have contributed to the “ex” part of her title). I have a framed, signed artwork from Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario, that’s one of my most treasured possessions. My current office features a shelf dedicated to the evolution of Mario games through the decades—from the original cartridge (sadly non-functional now) to the most recent releases.
Now in my forties, I sometimes wonder what it was about this specific game that hooked me so completely. Was it the perfect timing, catching me at that impressionable age of seven? Was it the revolutionary design that still influences games today? Or was it simply that controlling this little plumber man as he bopped Goombas and collected coins provided a sense of mastery and control that was otherwise lacking in a kid’s life?
Whatever the reason, Super Mario Bros. wasn’t just my introduction to Nintendo or even to video games as a serious hobby. It was a fundamental shift in how I interacted with technology, how I approached challenges, how I valued exploration and experimentation. From that Christmas morning in 1985 to today, through dozens of consoles and hundreds of games, Mario’s first big adventure remains the foundation upon which my love of this medium was built.
When my nephew Jake turned seven—the same age I was when I first played Super Mario Bros.—I gave him a Switch with a subscription to Nintendo’s online service so he could play the original. I watched as he died to that first Goomba, just as I had. I resisted the urge to grab the controller and show him how it’s done. Some lessons you need to learn yourself. By his fifth attempt, he’d made it to the flagpole. Some things never change.
