Super Mario Bros.

aka: Mario 1, SMB, Super IrmĂŁos, Super Mario Brothers
Moby ID: 7298
NES Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Princess has been kidnapped by the evil Bowser, and it is up to Mario and brother Luigi to save the day.

The first-ever platform adventure for the Mario Brothers has the player exploring level after level, with Bowser to contend with as the end of level boss. Power-ups include the Super Mushroom, which increases Mario's size and power, the fire flower, allowing him to shoot fireballs at enemies, and the ever-important starman for a short burst of invincibility.

Each level includes a bonus section filled with coins plus a shortcut through the level, plenty of bad buys and obstacles to get past, and an end-of-level flag, in which the higher the player grabs it, the more points are awarded to them. Certain levels also include warp points, which take the player to higher levels.

Spellings

  • ă‚čăƒŒăƒ‘ăƒŒăƒžăƒȘă‚Șăƒ–ăƒ©ă‚¶ăƒŒă‚ș - Japanese spelling
  • 超çș§é©Źé‡Œć„„ć…„ćŒŸ - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 슈퍌 ë§ˆëŠŹì˜€ëžŒëŒë”ìŠ€ - Korean spelling

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Credits (NES version)

7 People

Directed by
Produced by
Executive producer
Assistant director
Programmed by
Graphics designed by
Original music by

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 57 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 453 ratings with 18 reviews)

Behold
the game that saved an industry!

The Good
The art direction on the first Super Mario Bros. (SMB) game was both memorable and adorable. Mushroom men, turtle troopers, fire flowers, breakable bricks, giant plumbing pipes
it all added up to something like a slightly industrial twist on “Alice in Wonderland.” And a twisted fairy tale is at the heart of this game, so that makes perfect sense. Mario was playing the role of animated anti-hero long before anyone even dreamed of Shrek!

Just as important as the art was the fabulous music. If you were to hum the overworld and underworld themes to SMB in public, the odds are good that somebody within earshot would recognize them. The sound effects were both realistic and satisfying. Smashing bricks really sounds like smashing bricks, and the happy-cool noises that accompany mushrooms, fire flowers, invincibility stars, and other goodies you find add to the simple joy of discovering them.

Of course, I would be remiss not to praise SMB for its elegant and incredibly innovative design. SMB was truly the harbinger of a new era in arcade games. Gone forever were the days of single-screen playing fields and their compressed, suffocating feel; from then on, arcade gamers would expect to scroll through an entire world of fun and fantasy. (Of course, big props must also go to David Crane’s landmark Pitfall games for pointing the industry in this direction.) Moreover, it showed that a video game world could benefit greatly by having destructible environments. Except for Asteroids and Lode Runner, I can’t think of any early action-arcade title that let you smash things up as much as SMB did.

While mostly linear, SMB still gave the player considerable freedom within that linear structure. Most levels featured hidden areas and alternate paths to victory, and “warp zone” pipes let you bypass entire worlds and advance much faster—the downside being that you couldn’t gain the extra lives and other rewards in the bypassed areas. But those warp paths were just the tip of the iceberg as far as secrets and “easter eggs” were concerned. Just when you thought you had uncovered SMB’s secrets, you’d play the game with somebody else and they’d show you something new. Magical stuff, and I can’t recall playing anything like it that preceded it.

Younger gamers might have difficulty grasping how revolutionary all of this stuff seemed back in the day, but take my word for it: video games felt vastly different after Super Mario, and this surely played a big part in reviving the industry after the great Atari bust of the early 1980s.

The Bad
No game is flawless. Even the great SMB is no exception to this rule. For one thing, it can get repetitive. That’s not uncommon for arcade games, and SMB holds up better than almost any other game of its era, but it’s still a problem. How many times did we really need to hear that our princess is in another castle? More seriously, it would have been nice if the action didn’t always have you running in the same direction. Even Link is a lefty, so how come Mario only gets to go right?

From the perspective of any mediocre platform gamer (that’s me!), SMB was a bit hard. The early levels were rather unchallenging, but from World 5 on things get significantly harder. I’ve beaten the game without cheating, but believe me, it did not come easily. For most games I’d probably say it wasn’t worth the effort. If you are struggling with this one, then I’d say that playing with a Game Genie might be a good idea. It would be sad for any dedicated retro gamer not to explore the later levels just because his reflexes aren’t quite up to the task.

Finally, a word on multiplayer. I don’t use multiplayer in most games, but I did use it quite a bit with SMB (my lucky cousins had this game long before I did). It was ok, but the sequential nature of it seemed a bit of a waste. You spent lots of time watching the other person play—especially if they were good—which could get boring fast. After the simultaneous multiplayer of Mario Bros., the IGO-HUGO of SMB seems like a bit of a step backwards. It probably wasn’t at all practical at the time, but a cooperative play mode could have been a blast.

The Bottom Line
If Super Mario Bros. had not been made, would another game have come along to save the home video game industry? Probably. Still, SMB is the game that actually DID save the industry. It still holds up well today, and so it deserves all of the accolades it gets—and more.

NES · by PCGamer77 (3158) · 2008

A great 2-D platformer game

The Good
It's addictive, you really want to beat it and it's the original Mario game. You get power-ups like the mushroom and fire flower and fight classic enemies. Each world had 4 levels, the fourth level being a castle. At the end of each castle you have to fight Bowser.

The Bad
Just one thing: When you get game over you must start back from level 1. I can see not starting on the level that you died on, that'd make it to easy, but at least at the beginning of the world you were on (say if you get game over at level 3-3 you go back to 3-1 or something) or as a minimum have a save point once after every 2 worlds!

The Bottom Line
Even though it;s the mother of all Mario games I wouldn't get it. It was a good game when it came out, but nothing compared to Super Mario World or Super Mario Bros. 3. However, I would suggest getting Super Mario All-Stars for SNES because that way you get an upgraded version of this game, Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 and Super Mario the lost levels (which is similar to Super Mario Bros. 1 but with all new levels never before seen). For my rating I'm going to give this game a good rank since its probably the best game of it's time (mid-late 80's) but compared to even the games for SNES it's not very high quality.

NES · by darthsith19 (62) · 2006

Hmmmm.... Mushrooms!!

The Good
Looking at this legendary game decades away is somewhat of a futile exercise, as everything good and bad about it has already been penned by anyone from respected critics, to dummies with only a passing knowledge of the game that arguably made Nintendo what it is today... of course, since I have nothing better to do, why shouldn't I indulge in adding my two cents to the fray?

Don't worry, I promise I'll be brief :)

With it's blend of trippy, fantasy levels, cutesy enemies, smooth scrolling and perfectly refined game mechanics (that remain the template for the genre to this day), Super Mario Bros. managed to bring a level of arcade gaming perfection previously unheard of in home-based videogame systems, and provided an original experience unrivaled anywhere. The story has been chronicled everywhere so there's no point in reiterating it, but the results are baffling: with a simple design evolved from the basic run'n jump games that preceeded it, the designers managed to hit that nail of game design that such games as Tetris or even Doom also got: simple, but detailed game mechanics, challenging arcade gameplay supported by a perfect control scheme, smooth graphics and sounds to complement the gameplay, and lots of imagination poured into unique creatures and levels, devious jumping puzzles, etc.

Interesting to note that a storyline is never a big consideration in any case, uh? I'll leave that for someone else to discuss. In any rate SMB manages to be one of the holy classics of gaming due to the sheer FUN it is to play, an enjoyable ride from start to finish as you embark on the rather silly but engaging quest to save the sterotypical maiden in distress as an excuse to sort out the many challenges laid for you on each level and longing for the challenges that awaited you on the next carefully designed level (not a trivial matter, as any game of that era can prove, when advancing levels the games merely recycled what had been done before, adjusting the difficulty or simply speeding up gameplay (see: PAC-MAN) Mario on the other hand offered unique challenges in different settings and with different moods (thanks to the excellent graphics and sounds of it's day, which allowed a full soundtrack whose main theme is nothing short of an anthem for a generation of gamers [myself included in a somewhat uncanny and frightening way, as I'm able to almost mystically recall the tune years away as if it were some type of racial memory!]).

All that plus a lot of strange underlying themes that have always to it's charm when viewed from the warped eyes of an adult mind (Eating a mushroom makes you "higher"? Yeah, like Peyote right? A "flower" that makes you shoot fireballs? Mushroom-People turned into blocks? (which you get to break!) Jumping plumbers?? To this day I wonder just what kind of fumes the developers of these types of games inhaled, either that or the designers where trying to tell us something all along... probably a pro-drugs message of some sort.

The Bad
Probably the only problem with Mario is that as the Mega-blockbuster title of it's day, it was copied and cloned to death, making it so that pretty much every console to this day has to have a cutesy mascot platformer with trippy locales and gameplay based on the same grounds as Mario's (run'n jump through many levels, facing a boss near the end, doing whatever makes him angry three times, and then repeating until you get to the princess or whatever it is you need to find).

The 2P mode was pretty crappy the way I see it, and I also disliked the fact that you had to beat the game in one sitting (reason numero uno for me to hate early console-based platformers) which coupled with the large number of levels made it more of a challenge than I was willing to handle at the time (I mean, C'mon!! You keep rescuing the princess and it's just a stupid retainer over and over again!! What the fuck?? Am I not good enough for her???).

...Oh yeah! And the movie!! BWAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!

The Bottom Line
Just a little game that spawned an entire genre, cemented the most well-known videogame mascot ever, and sold billions of copies worldwide. A pretty good achievement for a company that used to make cards and a game based on the acid trips of a couple of plumbers stoned out of their minds.

NES · by Zovni (10504) · 2005

[ View all 18 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
It seemed like a weird idea for Star Wars also... Pseudo_Intellectual (66274) Jan 31, 2008

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The NES version of Super Mario Bros. appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Cereal

Super Mario Bros. was popular enough to have a breakfast cereal based on the game called the "Nintendo Cereal System", and was co-packaged with Legend of Zelda cereal. The sweetened corn bits were in the shape of Mario, Koopa Troopa, Goomba, Bowser, and a Super Mushroom.

NES supplement

For a time, Super Mario Brothers was the game packaged with a new NES system, along with the Zapper Light Gun and the game Duck Hunt.

Parody

Joe Dixon released a spoof version of Super Mario Bros. in late 2002. It replaces Mario, Toadstool, and the enemies with characters from South Park.

Sales

According to the Guiness Book Of Records, as of 2003 Super Mario Bros. is the best-selling video game of all time, with a total of 40.23 million units sold worldwide, as of 1999. The whole Mario Bros. series has 26 games and sold over 152 million copies since 1983, according to Guiness.

It is widely believed that the billionth game unit sold by Nintendo was Super Mario Bros..

TV series

Super Mario Bros. was popular enough to have a TV cartoon based on it in the late 1980's-early 1990's. It starred "Captain" Lou Albano as Mario, and Danny Wells as Luigi in the live-action segments, and animated Mario cartoons Monday-Thursday (Friday was for cartoons based on Legend of Zelda).

Awards

  • EGM
    • November 1997 (Issue 100) - ranked #2 (Titles That Revolutionized Console Gaming) (NES version)
    • February 2006 - #1 out of 200 Games of their Time
  • FLUX
    • Issue #4 - #66 in the "Top 100 Video Games of All-Time" list
  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue 100) - #2 in the "Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list"
    • October 2005 (Issue 138) - one of the "Top 25 Most Influential Games of All Time"
  • IGN
    • #1 Game of All Time (or revolutionary graphics and gameplay at the time of its release)
  • Official Nintendo Magazine
    • Greatest Nintendo Game
  • Power Play
    • 1987 - Best NES Game '87
  • Retro Gamer
    • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #24 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
    • Issue 37 - #23 in the "Top 25 Platformers of All Time" poll
  • The Strong National Museum of Play
    • 2015 – Introduced into the World Video Game Hall of Fame

Information also contributed by Big John WV, Guy Chapman, Mat Neuteboom, Maw, Mumm-Ra, PCGamer77 and sgtcook

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Wii added by Corn Popper. Nintendo 3DS added by ResidentHazard. Wii U, Arcade added by Michael Cassidy. Game Boy Advance added by Guy Chapman. Nintendo Switch added by Kam1Kaz3NL77.

Additional contributors: PCGamer77, Jeanne, Guy Chapman, chirinea, Alaka, Vaelor, gamewarrior, LepricahnsGold, Patrick Bregger, sgtcook, Thomas Thompson, FatherJack, lightlands, SoMuchChaotix.

Game added September 28, 2002. Last modified March 16, 2024.