Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. is a side-scrolling action game released by Nintendo for the Family Computer (Famicom) and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985.⁵ It first appeared on store shelves in Japan on September 13, 1985, and reached the United States as the NES launched on October 18, 1985.¹³¹ The game casts players as Mario—or his brother Luigi—on a quest to rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser, the King of the Koopa, and restore the fallen kingdom of the Mushroom People.¹ Widely regarded as the game responsible for the platforming genre as it came to be known, it is credited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling video game of all time.¹⁴⁹

The premise, drawn from the original instruction booklet, holds that the peaceful Mushroom People were turned into stones, bricks, and field plants by the Koopa, a tribe of turtles famous for their black magic, and that only Princess Toadstool, daughter of the Mushroom King, can undo the spell.¹ She is held captive by Bowser, and Mario sets out to free her.¹ Players negotiate eight worlds, stomping enemies and battling Bowser at the end of each.⁹¹⁵

Design and development

The game was directed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who had created Mario in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong before the character returned in the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros..¹³³ Miyamoto described Super Mario Bros. as “the culmination of a variety of factors,” built on technical know-how accumulated from earlier Nintendo titles such as Excitebike and Kung Fu, and intended as a capstone to the cartridge era before the Famicom Disk System arrived.³ He also framed it as an extension of what Nintendo called “athletic games”—titles in which a player controlled a character who had to jump over obstacles.³

The premise of jumping on turtles arose from reflection on Mario Bros.: Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi reasoned that a player should not be killed by landing on a turtle’s back, deciding instead that the turtle should come off worse, and resolved to let players jump on turtles freely in any future Mario game.³

The control scheme evolved during development; for much of the project, the A button fired bullets, the B button dashed, and the player pressed up on the directional pad to jump.³ Miyamoto found that letting Mario shoot freely while running gave him too great an advantage, so he limited firing to a single fireball at the start of a run, which freed the A button to become the jump command.³ The bullets became fireballs, a remnant of a discarded shoot-‘em-up cloud stage that survives as the game’s sky-based bonus areas.³

The power-up structure emerged from a visibility problem: an early prototype showed too little of the world ahead, so the team built the world to the scale of a smaller Mario and made him grow larger in the final version.³ Because the setting was a magical kingdom, Miyamoto made the power-up a mushroom—evoking folk tales of people wandering into forests and eating mushrooms—which in turn gave the in-game world its name, the Mushroom Kingdom.³ Two power-ups featured: a mushroom that made Mario taller and able to take a second hit, and a fire flower that let him shoot fireballs at enemies such as Koopa Troopas, Goombas, and Piranha Plants.⁹

Programming was carried out with the assistance of SRD (Systems Research and Development), an Osaka company founded in 1979 whose president was Toshihiko Nakago and whose Kyoto office sat inside Nintendo’s headquarters.⁵⁸ SRD assisted Nintendo’s programming for nearly four decades, beginning with the Famicom version of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.; Nintendo acquired 100 percent of the company’s shares in a 2022 deal completed on April 1, 2023.⁷⁸

Mario was conceived as an Italian-American immigrant, a blue-collar character living in Brooklyn; his name and appearance were designed to read as “Italian” rather than to invoke Japan.¹⁹¹¹ Miyamoto maintained a “backstory” that the brothers worked among the pipes of underground New York—Mario Bros. is set in Brooklyn, Donkey Kong in New York—and that one of those pipes connected to the mysterious forest of the Mushroom Kingdom, the link that became Super Mario Bros..¹¹

Technical features and secrets

The game was the first smooth-scrolling platformer in which entire levels played as a single continuous experience rather than loading screen by screen.⁹ Its sound design, the work of Koji Kondo, produced an enduringly recognizable theme.⁹¹³

The cartridge concealed several deliberate and accidental quirks. Miyamoto confirmed that the infinite 1-Up trick—repeatedly kicking a turtle shell against a block to rack up extra lives—was coded into the game on purpose and extensively tested, though players proved far better at sustaining it than the developers expected.³ The so-called Minus World, by contrast, he characterized as a bug that, because it does not crash the game, is “really kind of a feature, too”.³ The game contains up to ten blocks holding 1-Up mushrooms, two of them visible on levels 1-2 and 8-2 and eight invisible blocks placed on level 1 of each world, whose presence depends on the player’s coin collection and survival in the preceding level 3.² A continue function lets a player who has died and returned to the start screen hold the A button while pressing start to resume from the world they reached.⁴⁶

Reception and legacy

Super Mario Bros. was bundled with the NES at its debut, and its success did much to ensure the system’s commercial breakthrough; IGN called it Nintendo’s first “killer app”.⁹³ In Japan, the game generated a boom unlike anything the industry had seen, spread largely by word of mouth and covered in depth by the new Family Computer Magazine, which printed full level maps and strategies rather than review scores.¹³ Because it was not even finished when Nintendo of America was preparing the NES, the game was added late and at launch was sold only in the greater New York City area, as one of 17 NES titles available in 1985.¹³

The title launched the Super Mario series, which extended through Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and into three dimensions with Super Mario 64 in 1996, continuing to Super Mario Odyssey and the 2023 Super Mario Bros. Wonder.¹⁶⁹ IGN identified Super Mario 64 in 1997 as the next revolutionary step, the move to a fully realized 3D world, while crediting the 1985 original with setting the pace for the industry.⁹ The game’s characters and setting were later carried to film in the 2023 animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie, in which Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi are warped to the Mushroom Kingdom; Miyamoto served as a producer and treated its plot as a realization of the long-held backstory of Mario’s journey from plumber to the Mushroom Kingdom.¹⁷¹¹