Mario (character)

Super Mario Bros. is a video game developed and published by Nintendo in late 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game's two-dimensional, side-scrolling design would come to epitomize the modern platformer, a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms and over obstacles.

As the second-best selling home console game of all time, Super Mario Bros. is largely responsible for the success of Nintendo's first home console and for ending the two-year slump of video game sales in North America that followed the video game crash of 1983. It has inspired countless imitators and was one of designer Shigeru Miyamoto's most influential early successes. In 1990, Fortune magazine writer Susan Moffat predicted, "just as Mickey Mouse helped pioneer the animated picture in the 1930s, so might Mario help establish a new medium called interactive entertainment."

Creating a cultural icon

Mario debuted as the hero in Miyamoto's first game, the arcade smash hit Donkey Kong, under the moniker "Jumpman." Miyamoto intended Jumpman to be his go-to character, a slightly pudgy, silly-looking fellow who could easily fit into any game as needed. Accordingly, he designed his little carpenter mostly by creating elegant solutions to practical, 8-bit problems. A mouth wasn't visible enough, so the character got a mustache; the programmers couldn't animate hair, so he wore a cap; and to make his arm movements visible, he needed white gloves and colored overalls. The character was dubbed Mario by colleagues who said the nose, mustache, and overalls resembled the Italian caretaker at the small New York hotel where Nintendo employees stayed in the United States.

The 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. was the first to feature Mario as the title character and introduced his brother Luigi. And, owing to a colleague's comment on Mario's appearance, Miyamoto gave his character a new occupation: The Mario brothers became plumbers, whose jobs are to exterminate the various pests that come out of pipes—pipes that would become the trademark method of travel in subsequent Mario titles.

Later that year Nintendo released their first home console in Japan: the Family Computer, or Famicom. Evaluating Famicom operations, company president Hiroshi Yamauchi realized that a video game system, like any other computer, is only as useful as the software available for it. Yamauchi prioritized the home console market and in 1984 he assigned Miyamoto to lead Research & Development 4 (R&D 4), a new development group within Nintendo; their assignment was to create the most imaginative video games ever. One of their first titles would take Donkey Kong's plucky hero and place him in a new world.

Game design

Super Mario Bros. began with a simple idea: Miyamoto wondered what it would be like to have a character bouncing around under the background of a clear, blue sky. He took that idea to a programmer, and they started working on it. Kazuaki Morita, one of the game's three main programmers, described the working relationship between its designers and programmers: "In the NES era, the designer and programmer would sit side by side, constantly discussing what the game design should be, and the programmer would actually try to program the design right there on the spot while the designer watched."

At the time, division of labor was still an emerging concept in the video game industry. Before Donkey Kong, programmers were responsible for creating every element of their games—the same person who created the concept was also responsible for the coding, the art, and even the sound effects. But Miyamoto is not a programmer; he is an artist. As IGN's Rus McLoughlin tells it, "the games he designed were so different from everything else simply because he didn't really know what he wasn't supposed to do. That left him free to explore, and exploration soon became a part of his games." Super Mario Bros.'s progression is linear, but the game's hidden items, rooms, and shortcuts encourage exploration and experimentation.

The game's scope and sophistication were unprecedented. Pong, one of the earliest commercial video games, is set on a single screen; Super Mario Bros. has the equivalent of more than 200 screens. The seamless transition between these "screens" as Mario advances from left to right gives the game its smooth "side-scrolling" style of play. The full playing field isn’t immediately visible; it only unfolds with progress, fostering a sense of discovery and a spontaneity that’s complemented by the game’s whimsical, seemingly arbitrary architecture: bricks and platforms hang suspended in mid-air, green sewer pipes protrude from the ground, bottomless pits space the bedrock. Guiding Mario around, over, and under these obstacles and conquering the game’s quirky villains are the primary challenges. These challenges are alleviated by the precise control afforded to the player. The ability to alter the distance, height, and hook of the player-character’s jump is one of the game’s main innovations.

As large as the game is, its objective is as simple as Donkey Kong's: Players control Mario or his brother Luigi in their quest across the Mushroom Kingdom to save its missing monarch, Princess Toadstool. The rules are straightforward: Complete all four levels (linear, self-contained courses) of all eight worlds (collections of levels) within the 300-second time limit given for each level. The fourth level of each world is a castle, and at the end of every castle is Mario's nemesis and Princess Toadstool's kidnapper, Bowser, a fire-breathing dragon reminiscent of Godzilla.

Before the advent of timesaving tools like Character Generator Computer Aided Design (CGCAD), animating Mario’s movements was a laborious process. Miyamoto had to paint each character; the colors in the painting were assigned numbers and the programmers input the numbers into a computer. He also showed programmers not only how a character looked but also how it moved and what special traits it had. The programmers reproduced, line of code by line, Miyamoto’s designs as faithfully as they could.

During this process the team developed programming techniques allowing them to create a larger character than they thought possible, so they planned to make the game so that the player was always "Super" Mario but eventually conceived a magic mushroom to double the character's size, an idea Miyamoto attributed to Alice in Wonderland. Other "power-ups" were added to aid Mario in his quest: a flower that allows him to shoot fireballs, a flashing star that imparts temporary invincibility, and a green "1-UP" mushroom that rewards the player with an extra continue.

Synchronizing game music with game control

To compose the game's soundtrack, Miyamoto worked with a young musician named Koji Kondo. Kondo believed that Mario's music should enhance or highlight the action onscreen. When the time limit is critically low, for example, the music speeds up, and when Mario’s star-induced invulnerability is wearing off, the music fades out. Because Mario is an action game, Kondo said, "it’s vital that the music sync up directly with game control."

The game industry’s response

Super Mario Bros. debuted in Japan in September 1985; by the end of December, Nintendo had produced 2 million units of the game. Its phenomenal sales helped Nintendo command over 90% of the Japanese video game market. Soon afterward the company's nascent North American branch packaged Super Mario Bros. with its game consoles to test its product in New York City. The console was a smash hit, and soon Nintendo distributed it nationwide. The NES, along with Super Mario Bros., is credited with reviving the flatlined North American video game industry after the crash of 1983, a crash blamed on oversupply and poor quality control.

Super Mario Bros. did more than sell Nintendo's new system—it established the most lucrative video game franchise today and created a new generation of video game fans. There were Mario dolls, magazines, actions figures, cereal, clothing, a TV show, and movies. Nintendo produced countless sequels (something it continues to do) and even gave Mario's sidekicks games of their own. Although Super Mario Bros. was inevitably eclipsed in popularity by its more advanced sequels, it remains in demand today thanks to numerous re-releases and remakes in multiple formats and to thriving modding and "speedruning" communities (a speedrun being a play through of a given title as fast as possible). Glitches also add an unexpected dimension—and longevity—to the game. A programming error allows players who know exactly the right technique to enter World Minus One, a world that was never intended by the game's creator.

As "the blueprint for 2D platform gaming," Super Mario Bros.'s influence on game design has been tremendous. Some of the world's most famous game designers, including SimCity creator Will Wright and Metal Gear designer Hideo Kojima, credit Super Mario Bros. with influencing their work. As a partial consequence, the game enjoys envious placement in the media's "best of" lists. In December 2002, the notoriously critical editors of Edge magazine awarded a retroactive "ten out of ten" rating to Super Mario Bros. In their "The Greatest 200 Videogames of Their Time" editorial, game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly listed Super Mario Bros. as number one; and in their "Top 100 Games" listing, IGN also placed Super Mario Bros. at number one.