Super Mario Bros. Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 9/9/2020)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Super Mario Bros.

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): 2D Platformer

Platforms: NES

Release Date: September 13, 1985

Talking about Super Mario Bros is like talking about The Beatles: what can you say that hasn't already been said a million times over by millions of different people? Although talking about either seems like spouting hot, vapid air, I'm going to take a crack at it:

"Super Mario Bros. impacted my life so much that it made me give up my binding heroin addiction."

"Super Mario Bros. was the gateway into discovering the path to my newfound Muslim faith."

"Super Mario Bros. impregnated me with the new coming of our lord and savior."

Even though I'm just pulling these out of my ass as I type this, someone somewhere has probably attributed these games to all of these different causes. That's how influential this game is. This year, Nintendo is celebrating the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. and the franchise as a whole. It's insane to think that Super Mario Bros. is ONLY 35 years old, all things considered. Mario is the most recognizable video game character of all time. Not only that, but he's up there with the likes of Mickey Mouse and Batman as far as I'm concerned. It's hard to believe that this plumber's unparalleled legacy began in 1985. This was the same year that Back to the Future was released, and Whitney Houston released her first album. I guess comparing where music and film were at the time shows me that video games have come so far in so little time, and we have Nintendo's Italian golden boy to thank for that. Sure, there were plenty of video games before Super Mario Bros., and these games even had some notable icons in the mix as well (Pac-Man probably being the most notable example). There were even home consoles before the NES, so what made Mario so special? Why is talking about the impact of Mario like talking about the immortal Beatles? If you look at the early history of video games during the early 1980s, you can see some parallels between the two.

The video game crash of 1983 seemed like it was going to be the end of video games. Companies didn't have the same regulations that they do now, so many people were taking advantage of penetrating Atari's faulty defenses. Cheap unlicensed games (including several tasteless porn games) were infesting the video game market, inflation was hurting the industry thanks to the shoddy 1980s economy, and PCs were proving to have better capabilities than any video game console (I guess this is the only thing that hasn't changed in 35+ years). Video games would go the wayside of other youth fads like the mood ring and the pet rock. That's exactly what they said about rock and roll before The Beatles. In the late 1950s, this premature nail in rock and roll's coffin was due to a culmination of "the day the music died," Elvis joining the army, and Little Richard becoming a priest. It seemed like rock and roll wasn't going to be a formidable music genre but just something that the kids liked to piss off their parents for a short period. Rock and roll's spirit of rebellion had diminished in favor of keeping the old guard of Jazz for the musically savvy and bubblegum pop for the youths. That is until four lads from Liverpool ignited a revolution in rock and roll and spurred the British Invasion.

Since then, we've hardly looked back. Something very similar happened in the mid-1980s when Nintendo brought back the vigor of the video game industry and saved it from total collapse. They released the Famicom, or the Nintendo Entertainment System as it's known in the USA, in 1985 and ingeniously marketed it as a toy to have people associate with something other than the failing video game market. They also implemented a lock on the console so only companies that held the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" could publish games on their system. Out of the few launch titles for the system, one particular game stood out. Can you guess which one that was? Yeah, of course, it was Super Mario Bros.

As you couldn't already tell, Super Mario Bros. is a game that I have great admiration for. It's a game that essentially serves as the rudimentary fundamentals for what would become the 2D platformer. It's the base of every 2D platformer that would follow, and some 2D platformers are some of my all-time favorite games, so that's where the admiration for this game stems from. It's hard to believe now, but Super Mario Bros. was at the cutting edge of what a video game could do at the time. If you look at the games for the Atari-2600, for example, Super Mario Bros. was leagues ahead of those games. You didn't have to use your imagination to what everything on the screen was, the sound design wasn't reminiscent of a Kraftwerk song being played through a speak and spell, and you could actually finish the game. It seems like something required for every single player experience across all video games, but this was something radical at the time. Hell, there was even a "new game plus" feature in this game before we had a term for it. It definitely felt like a changing of the guard.

In regards to my experience with playing the game, it doesn't really reach to the same heights as my admiration for it. Super Mario Bros. is a very rudimentary game that involves platforming gameplay at the absolute base level, level progression that it quite repetitive, character movement that feels very stilted, and other characteristics that I'm not very fond of that have improved over time. For one, the game sends you back to the very beginning of the game when you die. It's understandable in an arcade format because those games are designed to make the player insert more money into the arcade machine, but in a home console, it's pretty cruel. Secondly, even though this game can be beaten in ten minutes if you know what you're doing, the levels kind of mesh together after the first world into a string of above-ground level, underground level, water level, and a Bowser's castle level. The warp zones weren't implemented to make the game progress quicker but as a way to skip the game's tedium. Lastly, the game's simplicity kind of feels dull. The fire flower power-up is a cool way to break up the jumping aspect of the gameplay, but that is the only other move Mario has besides his regular jump.

We give this game its well-deserved accolades for being (quite literally) a game changer, but this game hasn't aged well in the slightest. As iconic as this game is, is this anyone's favorite Mario game? Is this even anyone's favorite 2D Mario game? As the years go by, everyone (including myself) seems to favor Super Mario Bros. 3, which took the foundations that this game laid out and improved on them in every way. This was even on the same system as the original Super Mario Bros., but in comparing the way the two games look, Super Mario Bros. 3 looks like it was on a much more advanced console. If it weren't for Super Mario Bros. being the savior of the video game industry as we know it, I'd argue that it's Super Mario Bros. 3 that we should be praising as the greatest video game of all time instead. The improvements are just too substantial to ignore.

If you like playing video games (and if you're reading this review on this site that is specifically for video game content, I know that you do), you should say Super Mario Bros. graces every night before going to bed for saving this medium. Other than its place in history, I don't know if I recommend playing this game. Sure, play it for the historical context if you're interested in that kind of thing, but don't expect to get too much out of this game other than that. There are plenty of better Mario games even from the NES era, but the impact of the game is really unparalleled by anything else.