Super Mario Bros. Review (Retro WedNESday #5)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 18, 1985

There are games I love. There are games that shaped me as a gamer. And then there is Super Mario Bros., which is in a category that has exactly one member. This isn’t just the game that started it all for me personally. This is the game that started it all, period. The one that turned a struggling console market into a cultural institution and convinced an entire generation that video games weren’t a fad. You can make a reasonable argument that without Super Mario Bros., the hobby we all love doesn’t exist in the form it does today. That’s not hyperbole. That’s just the history.

I was born in 1986, a year after this game came out, so Super Mario Bros. is older than I am. By the time I was old enough to actually form memories, I was already playing it. My first gaming memory isn’t watching from the sidelines, it’s being part of it. My mom, my dad, my brother and me, all taking turns with that blocky NES controller, passing it around whenever someone died. That was just how you played. You waited your turn, you did your best, and when you died you handed it off and watched until it came back around. I don’t have a before time when it comes to this game. It was just always there, always part of the house, always something we did together in those early years of my childhood.

Because of this game, I was hooked for life on video games. Super Mario Bros. is responsible for that. It is, without question, the first game I ever played and the first gaming memory I have. This site might not even exist if Super Mario Bros. didn’t hook me so hard and make me a gamer as a kid.

Here’s what still gets me about this game all these years later: it’s just as fun now as it was then. Not fun for what it is. Not fun in a nostalgic, grandfathered-in kind of way like some of these games tend to be through rose colored glasses. But, it’s actually fun. Pick it up today, cold, and it delivers. The controls are as responsive and tight as anything on the market right now. The level design, which Miyamoto and his team built without any prior template to work from, somehow managed to teach players the rules of the game through the levels themselves without a single tutorial screen. World 1-1 is a masterclass in game design and is as simple a level as you’ll find in the game, and it was built in 1985 by a team that was essentially making it up as they went.

The progression across the eight worlds still works perfectly. Early worlds are approachable, forgiving, meant to build your confidence. By the time you’re deep into World 7 and World 8, the game is asking something real of you, testing whether you’ve actually internalized everything it taught you. The difficulty curve is nearly perfect. It ramps up naturally without ever feeling cheap, and when you die, nine times out of ten you know exactly what you did wrong.

There’s something worth saying about what this game is not, too. And that is that it’s not complicated. There’s no open world. No skill tree. No crafting system. No online component. No season pass. No day one patch. You press start and you’re running right. That’s it. And for as much as gaming has grown and expanded and evolved in the forty-plus years since this came out, there’s still something deeply satisfying about a game that just asks you to get from left to right and puts good obstacles between you and that goal. Sometimes the medium overcomplicates things. Sometimes you want to sit down, have some fun, finish the game, and not have it take a month of your life. Super Mario Bros. understood that assignment before the assignment even existed.

The graphics are still charming in a way that pixel art rarely achieves accidentally. The sprite work is clean and readable. You always know what is an enemy, what is a platform, what is a power-up, and what is going to kill you. That clarity is actually a design accomplishment even if it doesn’t look like one today. The music is another story entirely. Koji Kondo’s score for this game is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in human history. The overworld theme, the underground theme, the starman theme. Play two seconds of any of them to someone who has never touched a video game in their life and they’ll probably know what it is. That’s how iconic it is.

As a 2D platformer in the 8-bit era, I think Super Mario Bros. 3 eventually surpassed it. That game took everything here and expanded it in ways that are hard to argue with. But Super Mario Bros. 3 only exists because this game came first and built the foundation. You can’t have the sequel without the original, and the original still stands completely on its own four decades later.

My family passed that controller around and built memories around this game before I was even old enough to understand what a memory was. That’s how deep the roots go with this one. It’s not just a great game. It’s the reason I’m still talking about games at all.

Super Mario Bros. gets a five out of five: EXALTED.

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review of another NES title, Gun.Smoke or something newer like Mouse P.I. For Hire. Or click here to check out more game reviews. If you’re in the mood to find a movie to watch, you might be interested in my Ultimate Audrey Hepburn Rewatch review seriesthat just got under way this week.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.