This is a featured article!
This article has been reviewed by one of our administrators as one of the best articles on New Qualitipedia Wiki.
NOTE:
This was the first page on the now-defunct Awesome Games Wiki! Grust, the founder of said wiki, created it on July 20, 2015, the day said wiki was founded.
This article is about the 1985 video game. You may be looking for the the 1983 arcade game.
Super Mario Bros.
"Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!"
— Toad
Protagonist(s):
Mario Luigi
Genre(s):
Platform
Platform(s):
Nintendo Entertainment System Arcade
Release:
Nintendo Entertainment System JP: September 13, 1985 NA: October-November 1985 EU: May 15, 1987 AU: 1987 Arcade EU: January 1986 NA: February 1986
JP: Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels WW: Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. is a 1985 platform video game released as a Nintendo Entertainment System launch title, created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. A remake was released in 1999 for the Game Boy Color, titled Super Mario Bros. Deluxe.
Bowser, the evil King of the Koopa turtle tribe, has kidnapped Princess Peach of the Mushroom Kingdom. It's up to two fraternal Italian plumbers named Mario and Luigi to rescue her and restore peace. Unfortunately, Bowser has used his magic on seven of his minions to disguise them as decoys and placed them in castles to stall Mario and Luigi.
The concept of a plumber of all things saving the princess as opposed to a knight is a surprisingly good idea.
Extremely fluent and smooth controls and proper momentum.
Throughout the game are green 1-Up Mushrooms. There are ten of them in the entire game, and they are all well hidden. Additional lives are also awarded for certain scores, or for collecting 100 coins.
The graphics are amazing for 1985 standards and are still charming even to this day.
The layouts of the game make speedruns fun. In fact, the series was created after Yuji Naka made a speedrun of the game, and the first level was the inspiration for the character's speed. It also helps to get over the early levels quickly.
Every sound effect from this game has become iconic and beloved by gamers, but special mention goes to the jump, coin, and powerup sound effects, which often show up in tributes to both this game and games in general.
It further popularized the side-scrolling genre and many of the games of the same genre were inspired by this game.
It spawned the three most recognizable power-ups in the whole series: the Super Mushroom: that makes Mario bigger, gives him an extra hit point and him to smash bricks by jumping into them from below, the Fire Flower: that gives Mario the ability to shoot fireballs ahead of him while retaining the benefits of the Super Mushroom, and last but not least, the Starman, a very rare power-up that makes Mario invincible for a small period of time.
Different stage types allow for variety. The overworld is bright and cheerful and the more common stages. The underworld is dark and features a ton of bricks that can be destroyed. The water stages allow Mario to swim around and avoid enemies and the castles have obstacles that must be avoided.
Due to limitations, the game has a non-playable demo when you start the game. It shows the game playing itself a small part of World 1-1. The purpose of this was to be a tutorial for gamers.
The game is generous with the secrets hidden in the levels, giving you access to hidden parts of a level. Like pipes that lead to hidden rewards, or the warp pipes that you could access if you were good at the game. This was designed as an alternative for a saving feature.
The soundtrack, composed by Koji Kondo, is now one of the most legendary soundtracks in all gaming history. It's catchy too and sounds great.
The overworld theme is even familiar to non-gamers.
Many copies were bundled with Duck Hunt, which was a light gun game, meaning that customers get two games in one.
Unlike his spiky rival's big break (which only has 6 worlds and 18 levels), this game has 8 worlds and 32 levels.
This game pave a road for every following Mario title with some elements such as plot (bad Bowser kidnapped the princess, so the plumbers have to rescue her and stop his Bowser's minions), major characters (protagonists are Mario and his younger brother Luigi, Peach is a kingdom ruler, Toads are species of friendly fungi people; the antagonists are the big bad Bowser and his minions such as Goombas and Koopas, whose goal is stopping Mario's adventure) and power-ups, which were already mentioned.
Toad's famous "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!" line.
Princess Peach's "Thank you, Mario! Your quest is over. We present you a new quest. Push button B to select a world." line.
Great different level designs and gameplay, with 1-1 being the most iconic and popular level in the franchise.
There is New Game+ in the form of, "A new quest", which you unlock by beating the game once and restarting at the title screen. Goombas are replaced with Buzzy Beetles, enemies move faster, and all of the levels with harder counterparts later in the game (e.g. 7-2 is the harder version of 2-2) are replaced with said harder counterparts.
This game was the breakthrough for Nintendo as a console game developer and the breakthrough for the industry as a whole after The Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
You cannot make the screen scroll backward, thus preventing you from backtracking.
By today's standards, this game feels very archaic: Mario's jump is very stiff and running momentum is very high, because of this, it can be a nuisance on single-block platforms.
Enemy placement is sometimes unfair. For example, there's a Hammer Bro at the final stage right before the battle against Bowser.
Speaking of Hammer Bros., they are hard to be defeated by stomping, since you cannot predict the moment they will jump or/and throw their hammer, let alone escaping from them.
A "special port" by Hudson Soft for the NEC PC-8801 and Sharp X1 was made and it failed.
If you get hit as Fire Mario, you will go back to Small Mario, and if you are Small Mario and get a Fire Flower, it works as the Super Mushroom.
The final Bowser is barely changed from the ones before. He tosses hammers and breathes fire, unlike the fake Bowsers in Worlds 6 and 7 which only toss hammers, but that's it. The real challenge is just getting to him, much less with a power up on hand (in World 8, not likely). And getting to Bowser with an extra hit turns him into a complete joke no matter when you fight him. Just take a hit and then run to the other side and grab the axe before the invincibility wears off.
The game has no continues, meaning that if you lose all your lives, you have to start all over from the beginning. Fortunately, there's a cheat which grants you continues.
Thankfully, when you lose you lives in both Deluxe and All-Stars versions, you're allowed to start from the beginning of the world where you died. The Virtual Console/Nintendo Switch Online versions have save slots.
If you lost all your lives, press and hold the A button until you return to the title screen, and while holding it, press Start. As a result, you'll begin on the start of the world you got a Game Over instead of World 1-1.
Super Mario Bros is one of the most recognized games of all time. It is also considered one of the best games ever made and is hugely responsible for making North American game industry good again after the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. Though it is not the first Mario game, it is responsible for the Super Mario franchise, and made Mario an icon of Nintendo and gaming in general. To this day it is still considered a great game despite its now-primitive design. James Rolfe as The Angry Video Game Nerd in his review of Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs, called Super Mario Bros. the "time-tested approved way to make a side-scrolling platform game."
In fact this game has hidden 248 worlds. In the Famicom Disk System if the player uses the swap-cartridge trick by using the Tennis videogame without restarting and then re-inserting the Super Mario Bros cartridge and then press A + Start, the player loads worlds beyond world 8. As a result some worlds load the same existing levels like G-1 (16-1) being the world 1-2, I-1 (18-1) being the world 3-1, the X-1 (33-1) being the world 8-4 while some of them are basically the same but with different theme such as the world 9-1 and 9-2 being underwater versions of 6-2 and 1-4/6-4 the world K-1 (20-1) being the overwold version of 3-4 and so on while there are glitched levels like E-1 (14-1) being a glitched castle level while T-1 (29-1) is a glitched underground bonus level. Some of them as glitched worlds that leaves Mario stuck in the roof like W-1 (32-1) which is a underground glitch level and Triangle Right-5 (51-5) which is a glitched castle level. However those aforementioned worlds will crash the game if the player uses a exploit to unstuck Mario in it. Some worlds leaves a black screen. However this glitch is not recommended at all because re-inserting cartridges too many times it will damage the cartridge entrance.
This is also evident by a famous glitch in the world 1-2 in where Super Mario must jump through the wall of the tube and then enters to the world -1 (36-1) known as Minus World which loads the world 2-2/7-2 in the NES versions while in the Famicom versions loads a underwater version of the world 1-3 with a gray Bowser and Peach here while in the next level loads the same 2-3/7-3 level and the next level loads an underground version of 4-4 with Bloopers floating.
.png)
