Super Mario Bros. (electronic game)

Super Mario Bros. is a platform video game released by Nintendo in 1985. Wildly popular from the time of its debut, Super Mario Bros. is often regarded as the most well-known and influential video game ever created. Mario and Luigi—the titular Mario brothers—are also generally considered the most iconic characters in video game history. Featuring a simple but effective plotline requiring players to rescue the Mushroom Kingdom’s Princess Peach from the clutches of evil King Bowser, Super Mario Bros. was a smash hit that arguably saved the faltering video game industry and spawned a franchise of Mario-themed games and other media that has been continually expanding for decades. Super Mario Bros. also played a significant role in Nintendo’s rise to prominence as a major player in the video game market of the 1980s and 1990s and its maintenance of that position ever since.

Background

Super Mario Bros. is set in the imaginary Mushroom Kingdom, a land populated by a peaceful people called the Toads who resemble mushrooms. The game’s narrative begins shortly after the evil reptilian King Bowser uses a special curse to turn the Toads into bricks and seize control of their land. The only person with the power to lift Bowser’s curse is Princess Peach, the Mushroom Kingdom leader who is also sometimes known as Princess Toadstool. To secure his hold on power, Bowser imprisons Peach in one of his castles. As a result, the Mario brothers set out to rescue Princess Peach, defeat Bowser, and free the Toads.

The gameplay of Super Mario Bros. is relatively straightforward. It is a side-scrolling platform game that requires players to navigate through a virtual environment that includes eight separate worlds, each divided into a series of main levels, boss levels, and bonus rooms. The goal is to reach Princess Peach and rescue her from King Bowser. While there are both single-player and two-player modes, Mario is always the game’s primary protagonist. Luigi is only playable in two-player mode. Each level moves from left to right in a linear fashion and consists of various platforms such as landmasses, blocks, bricks, sewer pipes, and scaffolding. Different levels also have unique items that match the theme of the world in which they are located, i.e. pyramids or clouds. Each level also houses hidden bonus areas that can usually be accessed through pipes. These bonus rooms typically have abundant supplies of the game’s special items and power-ups. Some of these include magical mushrooms that allow Mario to temporarily grow to twice his normal size, fire flowers that give Mario the power to shoot fireballs at his enemies, and 1-up mushrooms that give the player extra lives.

As the game proceeds, players encounter a variety of enemies that must be either dispatched or avoided. The most common of these enemies are Koopa Troopas and Koopa Paratroopas, killer turtle-like foes that serve as Bowser’s minions. Others include mushroom creatures called Goombas, piranha plants that occasionally pop up from open sewer pipes, and a cloud-riding turtle named Lakitu.

Overview

The history of Super Mario Bros. and the broader Mario franchise began with noted video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Working for the Japanese video game company Nintendo in the early 1980s, Miyamoto was tasked with creating a video game that would be more appealing to American audiences than the company’s prior releases. Miyamoto’s initial effort in this endeavor led to the development of Donkey Kong (1981). Donkey Kong was a single-screen platform arcade game that featured a carpenter called Jumpman who had to rescue his girlfriend Pauline from the clutches of the evil titular character, a giant gorilla. The game was an immediate hit and quickly spawned a sequel, Donkey Kong Junior, in 1982. Jumpman, now rechristened as Mario, appeared in Donkey Kong Junior as the game’s main antagonist. This marked the only time Mario was ever portrayed as a villain. The following year, Mario was joined by his brother Luigi for the duo’s first starring role in a new arcade game called Mario Bros. A single-screen platformer in the same vein as Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. was popular enough to convince Nintendo that Mario would be a good fit for its popular Family Computer (Famicom) home console video game system.

To craft Mario’s console debut, Miyamoto teamed with previous collaborator and fellow game designer Takashi Tezuka. Unlike its predecessor, the new game was not a single-screen platformer. Instead, Super Mario Bros. was a side-scrolling platform game that allowed for a much more varied gameplay experience. Another significant difference was that Mario and Luigi could no longer be played simultaneously. In single-player mode, Mario is the lead character. In two-player mode, the characters and players switch off between levels. When it finally hit the shelves in 1985, Super Mario Bros. was a massive success. More than 40 million copies of the game were sold—a record that stood for almost twenty-four years.

The breakout success of Super Mario Bros. marked the beginning of one of the largest and most popular franchises in video game history. The first sequel to Super Mario Bros. was 1988’s Super Mario Bros. 2. Other early titles included Super Mario Land (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), and Super Mario World (1991). Some later entries included Super Mario 3D World (2013), Super Mario Run (2016), and Super Mario Odyssey (2017). Super Mario Bros. also spawned numerous spin-off games that eventually turned into separate series, including Dr. Mario (1990), Super Mario Kart (1992), and Mario Party (1999). There have been many Mario-themed educational games as well, including Mario Is Missing! (1992), Mario’s Time Machine (1993), and Mario Teaches Typing (1992).

The widespread popularity of Super Mario Bros. even allowed the franchise to branch into other forms of media. The 1993 feature film Super Mario Bros. starred actors Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi. Perhaps the best known of the various Nintendo-themed television shows was a 1989 series called The Super Mario Bros. Super Show that starred professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano as Mario. In 2019, following several years of rumors, Nintendo announced that they were working with Universal Pictures and the animation studio Illumination to adapt the Mario video game series into a feature-length animated film. The voice cast was later revealed to include the actors Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, and Jack Black as Bowser. Due to the combination of the stars involved in the voiceover work, the long-lasting popularity of versions of Mario video games even on further advanced consoles like the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Switch, and the publicity around the production and completion of the film, it instantly became a commercial and financial hit upon its release in theaters as The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023. By the summer of 2023, it had grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide.

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