Super Mario Bros. (NES)

Ever since I started The Game Hoard I knew I wanted Super Mario Bros. to be my 1000th review. It is a game of absolutely monumental importance, bringing the American video game market back from the brink, propelling one of the most successful gaming franchises into the spotlight, and codifying the design choices platformers needed to escape their early awkward years. It is a game that has been discussed by thousands upon thousands of people, and it is for that very reason I felt it important to add my voice to the massive chorus. One of the things I least like to hear from someone covering a subject is the phrase “what can I say that hasn’t been said before?” as it undervalues that person’s individual voice. Even if you feel your opinion isn’t particularly unique, your evaluation of something helps your audience understand you better, it informs everything else you discuss, and perhaps more importantly, if we dismiss something as discussed too much, we miss the chance for new discovery. This game from 1985 has had things discovered about it recently, be they glitches, development stories, or tricks perfect for speedrunning, and to dismiss your own contribution simply because it’s a well covered subject is a waste. Assuming such a level of extreme familiarity is a detriment to your work as well as there are new people discovering things every day, but most importantly, if they’re looking at what you have to say, they probably want to hear you say it. And so it only felt right for me to lead by example, because with this 1000th review I will be covering Super Mario Bros. just like I would any other game that comes across my table.

Super Mario Bros. doesn’t establish its story in game too well and in its English language manual some liberties were taken with the setup that don’t seem to persist in the series’s history today. The core idea is that the plumber Mario needs to venture through the Mushroom Kingdom to save Princess Toadstool after the evil turtle king Bowser has kidnapped her. The manual spins a more fanciful yarn though, the citizens of the kingdom being turned into parts of the environment by dark sorcery and Princess Toadstool is the only one capable of reversing the spell, making her rescue more pressing than just a royal dignitary being held hostage. Outside of the finale where the princess immediately tells you to replay the game on a somewhat harder difficulty the game doesn’t check in on this plot much, although when you do clear one of the castle levels where Bowser seems to be guarding her you’ll instead find that monster wasn’t the true Koopa king and one of the princess’s mushroom-headed servants tells you the princess is in another castle.

Super Mario Bros. is a side-scrolling platformer where your only skills to begin with are the ability to run and execute a fairly high jump. These abilities are technically suitable for everything in your path, the player needing to jump across gaps and defeat enemies often by landing on top of them. Both the level design and enemy types go through some gradual progression as you get deeper into the eight worlds that feature four levels each, and while some ideas like the bridge where fish are flying out from below are repeated later down the line, you can expect a gradual slope of idea advancement. Designer Shigeru Miyamoto referred to the game as an “athletic game” before the term platformer was popularized and that summarizes the intention behind much of the level design quite well, the danger rarely something actively aggressive towards you but the player needing to perform the right maneuvers to navigate around such dangers.

There are few distinct settings in Super Mario Bros., partly because only drastically different ones like the underwater levels or the castle interiors come with truly unique dangers. In the standard levels you’ll be running past simple foes like the angry Goomba mushrooms who poses little challenge but also foes with a little more potential for deeper interaction. A Koopa Troopa is a turtle who curls up into its shell when stomped on, the player then able to kick it forward to kill other enemies but also needing to make sure it doesn’t rebound and hit them instead. Bullet Bills fly across the screen in a straight path but can be used as midair boosts as you bounce off of them to gain additional height. The meddlesome Lakitu flies out of reach and peppers the area below with spiked turtles you can’t hurt to make for a level where you can’t guarantee the path ahead will be as safe as it seems. Perhaps one of the few enemies that doesn’t feel like it really enhances things are the erratically moving Hammer Bros., their tossed hammers coming out quickly and their patterns hard to gauge compared to most other dangers. When Bowser appears at the end of each world for a battle he might whip out some hammers on top of firing fireballs, but that exchange still feels more about finding your moment to run under and grab the axe that drops him into the lava for an instant defeat. Hammer Bros. move so much and throw the hammers so often they are likely meant to train you for Bowser but often involve either learning from death when the right window is or coming to a stop to try and suss out their movement. When they are positioned in a way where they hop between multiple layers of floating blocks they’re a more interesting and quick danger to overcome though. Underwater there are Blooper squids that are absolutely necessary to making those segments challenging, their swimming responsive in that they track your movement but bound to rules where they need to rise or fall while covering horizontal space. The fish in those water stages are not much of a threat and the open holes that try to suck you down aren’t too hard to escape, but the Bloopers move in a way that can be anticipated while still following the player to give the game one of its few antagonistic dangers that changes its behavior based on your actions.

Level design has its own bag of tricks to keep testing the player as well, the jumping responsive and allowing for midair adjustment but the navigation can still be made difficult despite that flexibility. Spinning fire bars are one of the more trying ones that require you to time your movement properly but their reliable rotation patterns make it possible to spot the safe window for when you should move even, the game often placing a few near each other to make finding that safe moment more complex. Fireballs can leap out of lava pits to make crossing them more treacherous, certain platform types like the scale will start to drop if you stand on it and potentially put you out of reach of the area you need to leap to if you linger, and the pipes you can sometimes crouch down into to travel to a special areas full of coins will have fanged Piranha Plants pop out of them so you need to make sure you don’t jump up onto them too eagerly. While the game mixes and matches ideas a little too often for stages to have unique identities, some of the castles do have maze-like portions where you need to figure out which layer of floating platforms to take to break the loop, and in general many levels position floating blocks to give you more options on how you travel. Very rarely do these floating blocks truly lead to more than a short moment where you can pick if you want to go high, low, or in the middle with how you want to get past a single small segment, but there are secrets to be found if you take certain high roads including the ability to warp ahead to future stages.

The warps are a useful tool to have in a game with limited lives, and while collecting floating coins or those hidden inside destructable blocks can earn you some more chances, the game is challenging enough you might face a Game Over. The game will set you back to the first level after a Game Over and you can use those warps to try and get back to where you were, but there’s also an odd secret code where you can hold down A and press Start after the Game Over to keep going in the same world you left off in albeit not the same level necessarily, this hidden way to continue certainly closer to how future games would handle things normally and without obfuscation. However, Mario has more than just retries to help him eventually face off with the real Bowser, the game hiding power-ups inside of the blocks that are dotted around most levels. Hit a question mark block from below and it might contain a Mushroom, the player expanding in size if they grab it to make them technically easier to hit but also giving them protection from one hit before they’re shrunk back down to normal size. If you stumble across the Fire Flower in a block you can grab it to gain the ability to fight back with more than dropping your body on a bad guy’s head. The fireball you can now launch will bounce across the floor until it hits something or exits the screen, this a good tool for clearing many enemies with less danger to yourself but not universally applicable. It can work underwater and can even clear out Hammer Bros. and Bowser if it hits enough, but some enemies resist its power so you’re not just slowly advancing and flinging fireballs at everything in your path. The timer does try to prevent you from taking things too slowly, but the Starman that pops out of blocks and bounces around does the same by making fast movement more rewarding. Grabbing that Starman will make you briefly invincible with a jaunty tune to temporarily replace the already peppy and memorable music, the player now able to plow through most danger save instant death drops without needing to be so careful.

The obstacle course approach to level design is what makes Super Mario Bros. such an entertaining execution challenge. You are given a responsive character and the occasional power-up to lessen the demand to perfectly overcome each danger, but the path before you is mostly a set progression of dangers where your ability to maneuver Mario determines your success. Admittedly the fact that you can only run right and areas to your left become impossible to return to once they are offscreen can be a bit of a bother, but beyond a few moments where a running start could help you out it doesn’t damage the enjoyability of making forward progress. The reactive enemies like the Blooper do shake up the game where it is needed, but this is one reason the Hammer Bros. stick out as their placement sometimes takes the game away from its focus on the player quickly realizing what lies ahead and responding in turn. They certainly don’t ruin the game with their presence but they don’t feel as smartly placed as other more complicated foes like the Lakitus that involve active monitoring to overcome or Bowser whose role as a capstone to the world makes slipping past him make sense as a brief moment of more focused responsiveness. Tellingly future remakes of Super Mario Bros. would space out the hammers the Hammer Bros. toss to make them less of an onslaught, but also beyond graphical updates or ones that make continuation easier, future rereleases and remakes would often just polish out troubling glitches rather than tampering with the core mechanics of the game’s other elements. Super Mario Bros. is mostly stable where it needs to be and little quirks in its coding have mostly lead to neat tricks for people looking to speed run the game or access unusual content like the Minus World’s infinite water level that wouldn’t be found during normal play.

THE VERDICT: Super Mario Bros. is a simple and enjoyable side-scrolling platformer that doesn’t need a grand idea to make its obstacle course levels engaging little challenges. Mario is a responsive player character but the levels still can challenge him even with the simple gaps he needs to leap over, assistance found in the form of straightforward power-ups but the obstacles in his path are not completely trivialized by their benefits. You’ll need to be good at jump spacing and reacting to what lies ahead because while most dangers are passively active, they can be turned more dangerous if you approach them a certain way or don’t account for what others dangers lie nearby. While it’s not quite a thrill a minute adventure, especially in the underwater segments that need the Bloopers to provides any real difficulty, overall Super Mario Bros. provides a solid adventure with simple and smartly placed obstacles that are entertaining to overcome.

And so, I give Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GOOD rating. Foundational titles for a genre can be made to seem quaint over time or have glaring areas for improvement that would be corrected in future sequels, but when I’m picking at the Hammer Bros. who are only really an issue at a few moments where they’re not positioned well it does go to show that a lot of the design in Super Mario Bros. is relatively even and a good fit for the player’s abilities. The Fire Flower can provide a surge of satisfaction as it makes certain enemies less troublesome but using it doesn’t mean you’ll complete the level free of risk. The Mushroom gives the player a bit of a cushion if they can’t perfectly weave around normal enemies, but the deadly drops are both a present threat and not an overwhelming one that is too demanding. You can clear many jumps without dwelling on them too long but the game doesn’t just place them there to keep you occupied, their spacing often meaning you do at least need to focus on your movement even during the simpler sections. Content reuse does make the Bowser encounters lose a little of their luster and repeating the fish bridge level without much alteration does make it a clear retread rather than a new concept, but these moments aren’t long and are spaced apart well, still providing a good level of danger so things remain interactive.

There is a temptation for some people to inflate the supposed quality of the action on offer simply because of this game’s revolutionary status while somehow being cooler to games that basically play the same but aren’t landmark titles, but Super Mario Bros. does deserve better than simply being what other platformers are measured by because it keeps the player consistently engaged. Save for easing you into the start of areas the game doesn’t have many empty stretches where you’re not focusing on what needs to be done to keep moving forward, and if they are free of danger it is because you’ve found a side area by way of a pipe or a beanstalk hidden a block where the idea is you get a moment of stress-free coin collecting as your reward. Some technical ideas could be polished up, the left wall being a hard barrier to prevent you from going backwards unnecessary beyond coding restraints of the time and it is surprising how the fire bars can hit you when you’re barely touching them in a game that usually uses leniency in visual design so you can slip past enemies even if you seemingly touched them. As mentioned earlier though future remakes didn’t tamper with much because a lot of what was implemented was done so with careful attention to how they improve the athletic gameplay challenge, this game easy to return to even for people who have played games that have advanced and evolved upon the simple but effective ideas featured here.

Did I say anything new about the game? It’s hard to know, and I didn’t want to delve into pointless details just so I can claim some unique perspective. I gave my honest evaluation of the game and presented the mechanics and concepts it uses to provide an entertaining platformer, and for anyone who has read my 999 other reviews that is likely what they were hoping to see. Now that I have taken a look at it though, it has a spot on my rating scale and has allowed me to discuss subjects that will make my evaluation of other platformers richer by having this point of comparison. Most every other review, whether it is an obscure game like A Dream of Burning Sand or High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition or a game most every gamer has heard of like Pac-Man or Tetris, is enriched a little bit by Super Mario Bros. joining them in my catalogue of reviews. Its addition makes this site more complete and enhances the understanding of my perspective, The Game Hoard itself based around the idea that I have played such a wide variety of games and those all contribute to how I view the next one I play. This 1000th review isn’t just a way for me to share my thoughts on an important video game that others have discussed before though, it’s an attempt to show you that you shouldn’t silence your own views on things simply because others have already said something similar. Video games are such a creative and varied medium and so to are the types of people who play them and ponder their intricacies, so if you ever feel like you want to say something but feel like it’s been said before, don’t be afraid. The world isn’t made richer by silence and even repeated thoughts are made stronger when they are reiterated by others. Super Mario Bros. may maintain its longevity through simple and smooth fun, but has proven a powerful jumping off point for deeper discussions and ones worth having by anyone who feels like they have something to say. Here’s to many more reviews, all of them improved at least a little bit by me taking the time to lay out what I had to say on this well-covered 1985 NES classic.