Why the original Mario Bros. arcade game is a dark trip down Nintendo's toilet
Mario Bros. (1986)
Mario Bros. (1986)
It strikes me suddenly, with no reason and over 35 years later, that for a supposed plumber I’ve never actually seen Mario do anything you’d call plumbing. He’s clambered through a few pipes alright, and he undoubtedly got up to some messy waterworks while on holiday in Super Mario Sunshine. But when have you actually seen him get down on his hands and knees, and fix the gunge and rubbish coming out of those nasty pipes?
Well, you need wonder about Mario’s plumbing credentials no more because in fact, this has all been explained and shown already. That’s when we first saw Mario Bros. for NES and Arcade, featuring Mario, and for the first time his bro Luigi, working down in the depths of what may well have been Bowser’s lavatory.
Or maybe it’s Donkey Kong’s toilet? It’s got to be some big boy anyway, because the enemy turtles, crabs, coins and other detritus in this game never seems to stop firing out of the effluent outflow. I can’t say I envy Mario and Luigi going about the wetworks of their day job, because plumbing is a pretty tricky business.
I know, because now I’ve moved out of my home and taken custodianship of several bathrooms, I’ve suddenly had to develop a passing interest in pipes, septic tanks and flushing toilets. If nothing else, I should at least know what to do if I’m going about my business one minute, and then the next minute I’m knee deep in another sort of business altogether, wondering what on earth to do.
Even with the simpler bathroom stuff, any chance where I can get a hammer out and pretend to be ‘the man about the house’, if there’s anything with water or pipes involved then I shall have to approach it with great trepidation. If I ever get brave enough to try and do something seemingly minor, like calibrate the kitchen taps, I bet you anything I’ll end up with a mouthful of sewage.
I once needed to get a new shower fitted in my old bathroom. No problem, you’d have thought. But like with anything else around the house, you’re having to learn an all-new language in order to actually engage in dialogue with anyone, be they supplier, builder or cowboy.
Electric shower? I understand those words together, but then you’re talking to me about PVC, main pipes, plasterboard, and oh, why not get a mixer shower instead? A pilot light, what’s that? Element? I just want to wash my cute little body, and if there’s a flowery little curtain there to cover my shame, then that would be just lovely.
Otherwise, I’m clueless – I don’t know, and I don’t wanna know. What I do know about plumbing, piping and the destructive force of rushing hot water is that I am not to touch it.
That sort of thing is always best left to people who know what a monkey wrench is, and don’t hide in the background whenever something manual has to be done. Ideally, they’ll also be well used to the smell of a - what was the polite phrase? - clogged-up shitter.
Plumbers don’t always tend to turn up, and probably most of us have complained about how much they can cost, but I’m sure I’d be the same in their shoes – whatever time they want to turn up at, they are worth their fee, and more. As long as their solution isn’t a frightfully temporary one, that is.
After all, when you need an IT consultant to fix some wee software fault for your business, at a fee of 200 quid an hour, they’ll do it for you, no problem. But you’re left absolutely gutted; all they did was restart something, or Google the answer, and then flipped around one line of code and handed you the invoice in one fell swoop.
Well, I tried Googling “how to turn baby dribble shower into high-pressure electric shower” to see if I could do some sort of a homemade job. They don’t make it easy for me, though - the bathroom in question had no less than 2 plug sockets, right where you wouldn’t expect them.
Is that the most vicious, spiteful trap you’ve ever heard of or what? Someone knew I was a plumbing pilchard, so they tried tantalising me into playing with electricity in the water closet. I’m surprised they didn’t supply me with a special fork to stick into the sockets for good measure.
There weren’t many lessons of the trade to be learned in the Arcade Mario Bros game, I can tell you that for nothing. Even Nintendo don’t seem willing to acknowledge this rubbish piece of software anymore. Well, it’s true that Nintendo bolted the game onto the front of the Game Boy Advance Mario ports as a little surprise – and surprises don’t come littler than that.
This really is early 80s Nintendo, and the best way to tell this is by observing the naff jumping mechanic. It’ll remind you of Ice Climber, a leap that gives you 50 feet of vertical height but maybe a gnat’s pube horizontal leeway.
That’s a bit of a shame, that the jumping in a Mario game is so bad. An even bigger shame is that, with basically every jump, Mario bangs his head on the solid objects above him. That’s probably a pretty big occupational hazard in the plumbing game, so I’ll give Mario Bros. points for originality there.
Otherwise, you spend your time needing to be cognisant of the constant stream of enemies that spawn out of the plumbs, and leave big messy entrails for you to clean up. No, sorry, that was Mario Sunshine again – a real flushed turd of a game, that one.
Here in Mario Bros, the goal is to flip over all of the enemies by hitting them from below. This puts them on their backs for a short period of time, so you have to actually go and confirm the kill by running up to their downed bodies and kicking them offscreen.
If you don’t get there in time, the enemies will hop back to their feet, enraged, and chase after you a lot more quickly – perhaps this is a reference to angry customers coming after you when your fix hasn’t worked, and they have to make that dreaded confrontational call to get you back round to sort things out.
If you do manage to subdue those crab and turtle customers, by kicking them into oblivion, you’ll get one measly coin for it. I happen to know that plumbers get a lot more coin than that. Anyway, you keep doing this until those damned pipes are clean, and then you move onto the next level. And they never look any different, either. What, you were expecting variety from the inside of multiple stinkpipes?
God, this game is the pits. I imagine this to be the kind of game that a plumber might invent in their heads to stay sane, when they’ve completely made a mess of a job, and they find themselves having to stretch their arms and limbs out to cover all of the leaking holes that have now appeared in their customer’s piping.
You can actually play this game two-player, against each other. It’s pretty cut-throat in the world of tradesmen, I’ll tell you that. Somewhat disappointingly, the aim of the game isn’t to send your rival off to the builders providers to pick up a sky-hook, or a long stand or a glass hammer. You just have to grab more coins than them and, with a bit of luck, elbow them headfirst into giant enemy crabs.
The graphics and mood are murky, there’s no music at all, beyond the admittedly catchy opening jingle. The idea for the game, even in 1980s Suburban Arcadia, was very boring. But the worst part of this game, the decidedly not-super Mario Bros.? Well, it’s a lot like your toilet when you screw things back in the wrong way, and all the crap comes firing out – it just never ends.
19 July 2024