Super Mario Bros.

aka: Mario 1, SMB, Super Irmãos, 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

  • スーパーマリオブラザーズ - Japanese spelling
  • 超级马里奥兄弟 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 슈퍼 마리오브라더스 - 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)

The Best

The Good
How the Hell do you review Super Mario Bros.? How the Hell do you review the game that started it all? The game that single-handedly brought the gaming market out of a slump to deliver one of the single greatest gaming experiences of all time. Which without we would have never seen the glorious video games that we marvel upon today. Super Mario Bros. is a game deserving every word of praise that I give it here. This game has single-handedly changed so many things in the gaming industry that I don't even know where to begin,

This game has been reviewed so many times over, that writing a review just for the mere sake of recommendation would be pointless by adding my own review. Of course, mine will definitely not be the best, but I write this review out of sheer respect. This game holds a special place in my heart as the first video game I ever played, so I can only hope my words give you readers an idea of how this games transcends almost every other video game made.

Mario has it all. It has the addictive, smooth side-scrolling game play of the arcades and translates it directly to console. No matter how much you play, you can just never put it down. It has the simple yet utterly fun and hypnotic game play that games such as Doom and Tetris brought us. The unique challenge the game provides is so refreshing it makes the game replayable 20 years after its initial release. It's simple enough to learn, but has so much to do and play.

At it heart it is only run and jump, but comes out to be so much more than that. Running through the mushroom kingdom as the mustached plumber just feels natural and utterly satisfying. The controls are tight and refined to make it feel like you're really controlling Mario in the 2D mushroom kingdom. The possibilities of the game are endless, and with its open ended platformer gameplay, there are countless ways you can beat the game with secret passages and shortcuts. You can use items and enemies to defeat the colorful and unique and varied array of foes that stand against you, You have the quick and fast-paced game play that is enticing yet difficult to the very end. The beauty of this is that almost anybody can play the game, whether it's 7 year old boy or the 40-something year old soccer mom looking for something to pass the time.

Players had the abiltiy to traverse the 30 something levels of run and jump fun, that kept getting faster and more challenging as you go. Of course, this was utterly unheard of back then. The open yet random level design allows you to play the level any way you want to, and there are tons of secret passages everywhere, from the simple vine to the clouds above, to the secret warp pipes past the end of every underground level. Every level seems unique because it seems completely random, and this is also where the game gets some of its charm, just the feeling of having to work around the terrain that seems to have no purpose. In modern Mario games it seems like every level is designed so that every thing has a purpose, but the randomness of the level design of this game adds a charm of its own. Plus, you can't ask for more varied levels. It has everything to keep the game changing. Courses such as the underwater levels, the mushroom-top levels, the flying fish levels, and the bullet bill worlds. And of course Bowser's ever addicting castle puzzles.

The game wasn't the first to use the plot which today can be referred to as a bit hackneyed, but this game has the greatest charm with its "damsel-in-distress: scenario, not only by creating levels like castles, but it had the weird, exotic enemies like spikey turtles, flying fish, fire balls, and giant lizards. The crisp graphics were new back in the day when games could only create the thick, blocky graphics that were trademark of the era before this game. The delightful tunes of course continue to enchant us even today, even becoming icons of the video gaming genre itself.

We cannot ignore the sheer magnitude of this game. It takes the smooth, simple, and addictive game play of the arcades and translates it into a game that is essentially considered the best game of all time. Refined and polished to the very end, Super Mario Bros. is not only one of the funnest games of all time but also ceremoniously ushered in a new era of gaming.

The Bad
Hey, there's a reason the title of this review is "the best". I cannot find anything wrong with this game, its just that good. Play the game and you will understand.

The Bottom Line
Super Mario Bros. marks a turn in the history of video games. Setting a new standard for video games, Super Mario Bros. ushered in an era of games with smooth game play, fast and quick challenges, and simple controls, that combines to create an amazingly rich and detailed experience. What is essentially the greatest game of all time, Super Mario Bros. remains playable even to this very date. You are not a gamer until you have played the phenomenon that is Super Mario Bros..

NES · by Matt Neuteboom (976) · 2006

Friday 18 October 1985: the Messiah of the console industry is born!

The Good
Where do I begin?

The game immediately hit with audiences, something impressive in 1985, with the video game crash of 1983-1984 still a raw wound for the business. The aforementioned crash was caused by an incredibly high rate of crappy games-- 90+% of games released in '83-'84 are EXTREMELY bad. This game's graphics, sounds and music are almost as good as contemporary Commodore 64 and other PC games. The game play is just awesome, the controls are very specific and friendly. B is jump, A fires weapons when tapped, if held, you can run, and the gameplay is simple but fun: You go from point A to point B on every stage, jump over koopas and goombas, hit coin boxes, and bash other obstacles that get in your way, and jump up the flag for points at the end. Quite often one of the coin boxes reveals a mushroom that allows you to grow to a big Mario, or a flower that makes you shoot fireballs. There are 8 worlds, each with four stages (the last stage has a boss on each world).

The music is just awesome and makes want to hum-along and keep you playing. Even the game-over music is amusing to hear. You won't feel any frustration or disappointments with this game.



The Bad
The level designs get a bit repetitive at times and gets incredibly hard towards the end, but other than that, I have no complaints.

The Bottom Line
Behold, this is the game that pulled the console video game industry out of life support in 1985 and eventually make an impressive recovery. No other game since the early Atari ones has made an enormous impact as this one!

One for your library, and is every cent's worth of your money!

NES · by Stsung (30) · 2008

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.