50 Years of Video Games: Mario Bros. (Arcade)

While many people know of the 1983 Mario Bros. arcade game, primarily because Nintendo has constantly republished its NES port and included it as a bonus in games from the Super Mario Advance series, few really seem to appreciate the importance of it. While the incredibly popular video game hero we now know as Mario debuted in Donkey Kong, there he was known as Jumpman and Mario Bros. would be the game that helped cement his more normal name in the public conscious. Perhaps more importantly it would also help introduce his younger brother Luigi, although since a Game & Watch game also known as Mario Bros. hit the market first, the arcade game instead is in the odd spot where Luigi was made for that game but didn’t debut in it technically. Where we find perhaps our most important trivia bit about this platformer though emerges from its port to Japan’s version of the NES, the Famicom. When development was beginning on the now monumentally important and popular title Super Mario Bros., designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka had no identity for their main character. Tezuka decided to go take a look at Nintendo’s sales numbers and noticed that Mario Bros. on the Famicom was still selling well even though it was over a year old. And so, the hero for one of the most influential games of all time was chosen, all thanks to the lingering appeal of a game about cleaning out a sewer.

In Mario Bros. you and potentially another player play as Mario and Luigi, the pair not quite decked out in their iconic colors yet as Mario prefers a blue hat here and Luigi goes for an odd mix of green overalls and a very dark brown shirt. This game also establishes their profession as plumbers, although the work they’re doing in it is perhaps closer to pest control as they plunge down into sewers of New York City to clear out creatures. Rather than a grimy and dingy place though luckily the brothers find a rather colorful place with plenty of room to move, there even being bright blue floating platforms they can leap up onto to help with their work. Perhaps things are a little nastier than they appear though as the sounds of their footsteps have a slightly gross slapping sound to them, this meant to sound like realistic footsteps but the approach the NES port takes by having a sort of bouncy musical sound instead certainly makes the task more pleasant.

No matter how deep you are into the game, the sewers in Mario Bros. always consists of the same platform arrangement. Each round will begin with the player at the flat bottom of four available layers. The top and third tier are similar in design, two long platforms extending from the screen’s edge but with a gap in the middle so characters and enemies can move between layers. The second layer features a large central platform and two smaller ones to the side, and if you do head towards one side of the screen at any point on it, you’ll appear on the other side and can continue moving for a wraparound effect. This simple setup is incredibly important because you’ll end up using practically every inch of it fairly consistently, because rather than dealing with your enemies by jumping on them or hitting them with an attack, the floors are your main tool for clearing out the sewer.

When a creature is moving about it is dangerous to the touch and any contact will lead to an immediate loss of a life. However, the floor beneath them is surprisingly flexible, the player able to leap up and smash their head into a ceiling to make the floor above them bulge upwards. This action will launch any creatures above you upwards, the idea being you need to knock them upside-down so that you can run into them and safely kick them away. If you hit the floor just right you can sometimes even launch them forward as they flip over, this a nice way of having them delivered down onto the layer you’re currently on. This attack method is why the platform layout is so important though, because while every open space is an opportunity for you to move between the layers, you need to consider your positioning so you can get under and enemy and knock them over. Adding to how you consider your attack approach is the concern that a flipped enemy will eventually right themselves and speed up if not seen to, so while the task is simple enough in concept, you won’t really succeed if you blindly go for every available attack.

The enemy variety is how Mario Bros. manages to keep introducing some fresh ideas despite the sewer always being the same. Emerging from pipes at the top of the screen, these creatures will always walk forward to try and get to the similar pipes at the bottom, entering those so they can return to the top and repeat another cycle. A round ends once every creature has been eliminated, and while no round ever has more than six pests, the rate at which they emerge varies and can allow for other dangers to enter play as you wait for them. Any contact with other creatures or items will cause them to change direction so they never get trapped, but the behavior of the sewer pests changes depending on what they are and the current game situation. Shellcreepers are simple turtle creatures that serve as your basic foe with nothing unique to them. They do help introduce some aspects of the enemies though, like how each foe defeated will cause a coin to pop out of the pipes that you can grab for some points or how the last enemy left alive in a round will shift color and become much faster to make taking them out more difficult.

Sidesteppers are probably the most troublesome of the pests. One hit from below makes these crabs angry and makes them move more quickly, a second hit from underneath required to truly flip them over. If you can’t assure a second hit, sometimes you can have a batch of speedy crustaceans running around the small space. Fighter Flies are slow but hard to hit from below as they travel about by hopping, and while you can jump over the other creatures below, attempting to do so with Fighter Flies often leads to the bugs jumping into you. Your own jump isn’t that great either really, Mario and Luigi not able to adjust in the air so you commit to each jump when it’s taken. While this does mean you’ll probably not want to hop over enemies unless you absolutely have to, the bottom layer of the screen can get packed with enemies where you might not have the choice, so managing which pests you kill ends up an important part of not finding yourself in a bad situation.

Different rounds have different amounts of certain creatures, but the more important changes come in what other hazards might bother you during play. The most dangerous of these would be the fireballs, these meant to appear when you’ve lingered in a round too long but eventually appearing sooner and sooner in a stage. Red fireballs will appear and begin bouncing around the stage at diagonal angles, definitely the most mobile danger in the game but also one that can sometimes end up in a part of the screen where you don’t need to worry about them for a bit. Green fireballs are a bit meaner though, appearing on one side of the stage and floating across that layer, potentially denying you that platforming space until they dissipate. The fireballs and the way they won’t always appear in the same spaces or bounce the same way probably leads to the part of the game that shakes things up the most since even Sidesteppers are bound to the platforms and the same entrances and exits.

Ice eventually becomes an issue as well. Slipices (known as Freezies in other releases) appear from the pipes and will slide about, dangerous to the touch but able to come to a stop and turn the ground slippery. The brothers already have a slightly slippery run since they slide a little when they need to come to a stop and need an extra little effort to jump forward instead of straight up, but you can smash a Slipice from below like the pests to eliminate it before it makes the already slightly off movement even harder. Icicles also become a concern, dangling from the ceilings so you can’t smash the floor they hang from. These will eventually break and fall and if you see them forming you can pop the bubble before it becomes a point, but their introduction in round 15 is perhaps where Mario Bros. goes from a breezy but challenging string of stages to something overly chaotic. With the fireballs starting to appear sooner, the tougher enemies in play, and so much ice around, Mario Bros. drifts away from its simple appeal a bit as it becomes difficult to find a space where you won’t get burnt or frozen on top of actually trying to find the moments to bonk baddies from below.

You do have a means of getting yourself out of a bind though, the POW block floating just above the middle of the brick floor something you can hit from below to damage any grounded enemies. It won’t wipe out fireballs unfortunately, but if you want to set up some pests for quick kills then it can assist when you need it, provided you don’t use it up. Initially a POW block has three uses, and the not so smooth controls might make you bump it accidentally when trying to leave the bottom layer. However, the POW block will regenerate after most bonus stages so you don’t need to treat it like it’s all too precious.

The somewhat frequent bonus stages can perhaps be seen as a breather between pest clearing rounds, although they perhaps best show that the movement is often more limiting than it needs to be. In these bonus stages you don’t need to worry about enemies or hazards, the goal being to just collect the 10 floating coins within the time limit. They’ll always be placed in the same position every time so conceivably it shouldn’t be hard to grab them every time, but even once you are used to your movement style, these bonus stages eventually introduce a variation where all the platforms are frozen over to lower your traction and eventually you just won’t be able to see the platforms at all. You will have no doubt gotten very familiar with the single platform layout used in the game by then though, so these bonus phases are mostly for accruing points, this being an arcade game that continues indefinitely until you fail so high score is the main objective. You can get an extra life at a points threshold, but if you do manage the impressive task of reaching round 35 there are no more unique variations to the enemy and hazard arrangements to be found and well before then it stops feeling like the differences are really that notable.

THE VERDICT: While the early play of Mario Bros. has a good mix of speed and danger despite the slightly off movement controls, the play area does eventually become so busy it starts to lose some of its appeal. Having to attack enemies from below makes more of the screen matter in a single moment as you have to properly approach each attack to ensure your safety and that you can follow up on it, and Mario Bros. starts rolling out some ways of interfering with that process that can make for a bit of interesting danger. It does seem to run out of new tricks around the time it gets carried away with piling in too much area denial at once, essentially providing a decent jump off point despite the aggressive manner in which it does so. Mario Bros. does at least make a lot of use out of a little space so it can be mildly amusing to dive into the sewer with the two plumber brothers from time to time.

And so, I give Mario Bros. for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. These days you likely won’t be playing the original version of Mario Bros. since Nintendo seems to prefer their NES port’s small but meaningful changes. The sound is nicer there and the brothers look more like themselves even if the Sidesteppers often seem to be missing an eye due to sprite display limitations. The remakes featured as bonus games in Super Mario Advance also swap out Shellcreepers with Spinies who have prickly shells so you never accidentally slip into trying to hop onto them due to the turtles looking like Mario’s more common Koopa Troopa foes. The NES version does remove a fair bit like the icicles and invisible platforms and alters things like the fireballs to be smaller, and some ports even give you midair control which can help make up for the movement quibbles. It feels hard to point at the best port since there are considerations like the degree of challenge or amount of content, but while the ideas were executed decently in the arcade original for the most part save for the later rounds going overboard with their hazards, it’s hard to say it has any big draws compared to what comes after. It always has that appeal of being the first version of Mario Bros. and you get little cutscenes introducing and explaining the new enemy types, but perhaps Nintendo left this specific version behind because it knows the design has elements that can easily be ironed out or improved despite having a fairly good concept for making the most of a single screen layout.

The arcade Mario Bros. game is definitely in an odd spot when it comes to how history treats it, but the ideas its gameplay pursues were solid enough that Nintendo likes to bring it back over and over again even if alterations have been made to the original format. Cooperative play can make this challenging arcade adventure more enjoyable if you do give it a shot, and the progression does have a nice climb in difficulty before it gets a bit carried away. While perhaps not an arcade game you’ll want to commit to for too long since its less out of control moments are instead a little too leisurely, but it does give you a good stretch of stages where things are changing around and altering how you approach your pest control work. It perhaps isn’t good enough to slot right in next to the amazing Mario platformers that were later in the pipeline but certainly shows that even early on the mustachioed plumber could do a good job headlining a nifty platformer.