Super Mario Bros.

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Mario Bros., Nintendo's 1985 platform game, had only about 20 bytes of cartridge space left once its music was added. Shigeru Miyamoto spent them on a small crown. The crown appears beside the life counter, and only for players who collect at least 10 lives. That scrap of memory belongs to a game that has sold more than 58 million copies. How did a program so small become so enormous? Where did its ideas come from, and how does its first level teach without a single word of instruction? What did its composer change about the way games sound? Why did many players outside Japan meet this home console game in an arcade first? And what happened when players found corners of the game that its designers never meant to build?

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• 2. Borrowed Ideas

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  Three games from 1984 taught Miyamoto's team nearly everything it needed: Devil World, Excitebike, and Kung Fu. Miyamoto used the phrase athletic games for the kind of play he was chasing, a label for what later became known as platform games. Kung Fu was the NES version of the arcade title Kung-Fu Master, which itself adapted the Jackie Chan film Wheels on Meals. While working on it and on Excitebike, Miyamoto began picturing a platformer where players would "strategize while scrolling sideways" across long distances. He wanted aboveground and underground stages, and colorful backdrops in place of the black ones used in the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros.

  The scrolling engine built for Excitebike gave Mario a feel that earlier platformers lacked. He could accelerate smoothly from a walk into a run, instead of moving at one constant speed. Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani has said that Miyamoto told him personally about another influence, Pac-Land, an earlier scrolling platformer starring Iwatani's own character.

  Miyamoto also hoped the game would be a "final exclamation point" for the ROM cartridge format, before the Famicom Disk System arrived. Work began in the fall of 1984, alongside The Legend of Zelda, which he also directed and designed. Zelda followed in Japan five months afterward. The two games traded ideas, and the fire bars in Mario's castles began life as objects in Zelda.

  In February 1985, developers from earlier hits joined the team and brought their tricks with them. Donkey Kong supplied slopes, lifts, conveyor belts, and ladders. Donkey Kong Jr. contributed ropes, logs, and springs. Mario Bros. offered enemy movement, frozen platforms, and POW Blocks. Miyamoto designed the world and led seven programmers and artists, with Toshihiko Nakago of SRD handling most of the programming and Takashi Tezuka sharing the design work.

  By December 1984, the team had a prototype in which the player simply moved a 16x32-pixel rectangle around a single screen. Tezuka then suggested using Mario, after seeing how well Mario Bros. had sold. The name Super Mario Bros. was chosen in February 1985, once the Super Mushroom power-up was working. An earlier idea had Mario or Luigi piloting a rocket ship and firing at enemies. It was dropped, but the sky-based bonus stages in the final game are a remnant of it.

  Miyamoto first imagined Bowser as an ox, inspired by the Ox King in the 1960 Toei Animation film Alakazam the Great. Tezuka thought the sketch looked more like a turtle, and the two worked out the final design together. Turtles raised another problem, because the team found it illogical for Mario to be hurt by stomping on them in Mario Bros. Future Mario games, they decided, would "definitely have it so that you could jump on turtles all you want." The name Mushroom Kingdom came from Japanese folktales in which wanderers enter forests and eat magical mushrooms. Nintendo wanted the game ready for the end-of-year shopping season, so it aimed for simplicity.

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• 3. Every Byte Counts

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  The cartridge inside the box held 32KiB of program code and data, plus 8KiB for sprite and background graphics. In the units of the day, that is 256 kilobits and 64 kilobits. The designers went hunting for savings and cheerfully treated the search like a television game show of their own. Clouds and bushes turned out to be the same sprite in different colors. Background tiles were produced by an automatic algorithm instead of being stored one by one. Sound effects were recycled as well. The noise Mario makes when he is hurt is the one he makes entering a pipe, and stomping an enemy sounds like a single stroke of swimming.

  The Goombas are the cleverest saving of all. Late in the project, the team decided to open the game with an easy enemy rather than a Koopa Troopa. Memory had nearly run out by then. So the designers drew a single static image and flipped it back and forth, which creates a convincing walking animation.

  Around July 1985, the schedule was extended by 3-4 weeks to adjust and fix memory bugs. In August 1985, the finished game was released to manufacturing.

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• 4. Teaching Without Words

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  World 1-1 had to do the teaching, because games of the third console generation rarely included tutorials. Level design carried that job instead. The opening stretch pushes newcomers to experiment with the mechanics before they can move forward. It introduces hazards through repetition, iteration, and escalation, rather than confronting players with a wall of obstacles. Miyamoto told Eurogamer that he built the level so players would "gradually and naturally understand what they're doing." Once they do, he said, they play more freely and it becomes "their game."

  The first mushroom shows the method. If it is released in World 1-1, it is difficult to avoid, which teaches players that mushrooms differ from Goombas and are good for them. Early levels had been designed around a small Mario, with plans to scale the sprite up for release. The team then realized it would be more engaging to let a power-up change his size during play. Miyamoto explained that "we came up with the idea of showing the smaller Mario first," so that players could see and feel the growth. He denied a rumor that the small Mario came from a bug showing only Mario's upper half.

  Starting small also makes finding a mushroom feel more rewarding. After finishing the game, the team chose to greet players with a simple, easy-to-defeat enemy, which is why the first creature in World 1-1 is a Goomba and not a Koopa Troopa.

  Not every design came from careful planning. Blocks that hold several coins were inspired by programming glitches. And the shell-kicking trick for earning extra lives was tested carefully, yet Miyamoto admitted that "people turned out to be a lot better at pulling the trick off for ages on end than we thought."

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• 5. Kondo's Score

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  Koji Kondo, a Nintendo sound designer, wrote the six-track score and every sound effect in Super Mario Bros. At the time, most video game music existed to attract attention, with little effort to suit the game itself. Kondo set himself two goals: "to convey an unambiguous sonic image of the game world" and "to enhance the emotional and physical experience of the gamer."

  His music is coordinated with the animations of the sprites on screen, which deepens the sense of immersion. He was not the first to try this. Space Invaders has a simple song that quickens as the aliens speed up, creating a feeling of stress and impending doom. But Kondo had an unusual advantage. In most projects of the era, composers were hired late to add music to a nearly finished game. Kondo joined the development team almost from the beginning and worked alongside everyone else.

  A prototype was shown to him so he could build the music around Mario's surroundings. He wrote the melodies with the help of a small piano. As the game progressed, he felt the music did not match its pace, so he increased the tempos. Feedback from Nintendo's playtesters led to further adjustments. His compositions were shaped by the gameplay, meant to "heighten the feeling" of how the game controls.

  The overworld theme has since appeared in nearly every Super Mario game and become part of popular culture. In 2019, Kondo returned to write new snow, desert, and forest themes in the style of Super Mario Bros. for Super Mario Maker 2.

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• 6. Stomp And Rescue

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  Mario and Luigi reach the Mushroom Kingdom through a clay pipe from New York City. There, a tribe of turtle-like Koopa Troopers led by their king, Bowser, has invaded. Using Bowser's magic, the invaders turn the Mushroom People into bricks, stones, and horsehair plants. They also kidnap Princess Toadstool, the only person able to reverse the spell. A second player controls Luigi in multiplayer mode, and he plays the same role as his brother.

  The game is eight worlds long, with four stages in each. The player runs to the right until reaching a flagpole. Jumping on enemies is Mario's main attack, though the results vary. A Goomba flattens and is defeated. A Koopa Troopa retracts into its shell, which Mario can then kick as a projectile. Shells bounce off walls and can rebound to hurt Mario. Underwater foes and enemies with spiked tops cannot be jumped on at all, and they damage the player instead.

  Question-mark blocks hold coins and power-ups. A Super Mushroom doubles Mario's size and absorbs one hit, though falling off the map still kills him. A Fire Flower changes the color of his outfit and lets him throw fireballs. The rarer Starman, often hidden in invisible blocks, grants temporary invincibility from minor dangers. Extra lives come from green 1-Up Mushrooms, from collecting 100 coins, and from chaining defeats with a Koopa shell or successive bounces on enemies.

  Each world ends in a fiery castle, where Bowser waits on a bridge above lava. The first seven Bowsers are minions in disguise, and the real one appears in the eighth world. Players win by jumping over him or running beneath him to reach the axe at the end of the bridge, or by using fireballs. After each decoy falls, a Toad retainer announces, "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!" Warp pipes hidden in some stages let players skip ahead to later worlds.

  Finishing the game once brings a reward in the form of a harder replay, in which every Goomba is replaced by a Buzzy Beetle, an enemy that fireballs cannot defeat.

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• 7. Arcades And Cartridges

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  On the 13th of September 1985, Super Mario Bros. reached Japanese players on the Famicom. Its North American arrival is harder to pin down. Most sources say it launched in October 1985, when the NES had a limited US release. Several others place it between November 1985 and early 1986. A wide North American release followed in 1986, and Europe received the game on the 15th of May 1987.

  For much of the world, the first meeting with Mario happened in an arcade. The Nintendo VS. System version debuted in London in January 1986, at the Amusement Trades Exhibition International show. It reached other countries that February, at first as a ROM conversion kit. This arcade version was far harder than the home game. Platforms were narrower, enemies more dangerous, hidden power-ups scarcer, and an extra life required 200 coins instead of 100.

  In March 1986, the game starred in an official contest at the ACME convention in Chicago and became a popular attraction. By May 1986, it ranked eighth among top-grossing arcade games on the US Play Meter charts. It sold 20,000 arcade units within a few months, becoming the bestselling VS. System release, with each unit regularly earning more than $200 per week. On the annual RePlay chart for 1986, it placed thirteenth, below Sega's Hang-On at the top.

  Japan told a different story. The arcade version was never officially released there. Instead, unauthorized coin-op machines built by placing a Famicom inside an arcade cabinet appeared by January 1986. Nintendo threatened legal action, including prosecution carrying a prison sentence of up to three years, but operators could still get illegal versions through 1987.

  Back on the home market, a Famicom Disk System version arrived in Japan on the 21st of February 1986. In 1988, the game was bundled on a single cartridge with Duck Hunt as the pack-in for the NES Action Set, and millions of copies of that version were sold in the United States. The arcade edition had one more consequence. Several of its new, tougher levels went on to appear in the Japanese sequel, Super Mario Bros. 2.

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• 8. A Classic's Long Afterlife

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  During September 1985 alone, 1.2 million copies were sold in Japan. Within four months the total reached about 3 million, and the Famicom had climbed to 6.2 million units by January 1986. In the United States, more than 1 million NES copies sold in 1986, and more than 20 million by 1991. By April 2000, the original NES release had sold 40.23 million copies, earning a Guinness World Record as the best-selling video game of all time. Its final tally for that release alone is 40.24 million, with 29 million in North America. Wii Sports eventually passed it, after more than 20 years at the top.

  Critics have stayed generous. In 2015, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted the game into its World Video Game Hall of Fame. Game Informer named it the second greatest game of all time in 2009, and G4 ranked it first in 2012. Reviewers keep returning to its precise controls, which let players decide how high and far Mario jumps and how fast he runs. Collectors have followed. In July 2020, a near-mint sealed copy sold for what was then the highest price ever paid for a single video game. In August 2021, an anonymous buyer paid a record price for a never-opened copy.

  Players also found corners the designers never planned. In World 1-2, a hidden warp zone sends players to worlds 2, 3, and 4. If a bug lets Mario pass through bricks, a pipe in that zone may carry the player to an underwater stage labeled World -1. Its exit pipe returns the player to the start, trapping them until every life is lost. The label hides a quirk. The screen shows a blank space before the -1, because the game actually calls it World 36-1 and draws the tile for 36 as a blank. In all, 256 worlds exist in the game, including the eight playable ones.

  A 1990 study in North America suggested that more American children knew Mario than Mickey Mouse. Yuji Naka, creator of the 1991 Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog, says that game began while he was speedrunning World 1-1 and imagined a platformer built on moving as fast as possible. A 1986 anime film, Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, is regarded as one of the first feature-length films based directly on a video game. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! ran from 1989 to 1990, with professional wrestler Lou Albano as Mario. A live-action film starring Bob Hoskins followed in 1993, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, from Illumination Entertainment, was released on the 5th of April 2023.

  Speedrunners are still racing through the same stages. At the game's 25th anniversary celebration at the Nintendo World Store, the record holder andrewg attempted a run while Miyamoto watched. In 2021, Niftski became the first to finish in under four minutes and fifty-five seconds. The current world record is 4:54.415, only 150 milliseconds slower than the theoretical best human time of 4:54.265.

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