How the original Super Mario Bros invaded the West
Super Mario Bros. (1987)
Super Mario Bros. (1987)
I won’t bore you to death on the whole video game crash story, blah blah blah, E.T. wrecked it for everybody, and all of that other stuff. History was the most boring of school subjects as we know.
And anyway, the whole event is quite hackneyed, usually the first thing a prospective gaming YouTuber researches on Wikipedia. That’s before delivering a webcam-filmed lecture about the whole affair, with jumpy editing, a slightly too desperate plea for subscribers, and a far too long intro.
No, neither of us have time for that. Suffice to say, in the late 70s and early 80s, we had an awful lot of terrible “games” - and I’m talking, less impressive than interactive DVD menus - polluting the market.
I’m not just talking about the usual sort of clag that delivers less than 5 seconds of enjoyment either. Even clag is too weak a word for games like Custer’s Revenge, or Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em. It was this kind of rubbish that was being sold, Morse code graphics and all, into households at premium rates.
Eventually the poor old gaming camel took one too many straws to the back, that straw being a game based on E.T., and over she went. That was the end of gaming. Electronic TV games were a fad that had come, stank up the place a bit, and now they were mercifully gone.
Well, that’s not really how it ended, of course. Nintendo decided they wanted to claw themselves back into the game, and they knew they’d have to invade the United States to do it. And with a string of arcade hits behind them, the most famous of them being Donkey Kong, they wanted more of the action.
The trouble was, the words “video game” were pretty much mud with consumers, retailers, suppliers, and whatever else is in the chain – truck drivers maybe. It’s been a long time since I studied business, if you couldn’t tell.
So, to ensure success for their plan to bring a new dedicated games console to market, and hopefully rot millions of children’s brains along with it, Nintendo needed a few USPs (there’s that business knowledge of mine again) to set their new Nintendo Entertainment System apart.
Firstly, it had to be affordable – some sets were more expensive, with the Deluxe Set weighing particularly heavy on the old 1980s leather wallet. But the console deck by itself could be had for a mere $90, or even $100 when bundled with a game I’m just about to mention. That’s probably seven grand nowadays, with inflation and all, but what price history?
The second necessary unique selling point, if you can believe it, was that the whole idea of the NES being a games console had to be played down. I understand that Nintendo’s initial plan here was to stick a comedy moustache onto the console to disguise it, but some of the children choked on the hairy prototype apparatus in the testing and proofing phase, so that had to be kiboshed.
Instead, the boys at Nintendo of Japan found a few dozen multistorey car-park robot attendants going cheap. They converted them into a fleet of R.O.B.s, short for the Robotic Operating Buddy – a robot that interacts with your TV and your unsupervised children.
So now it’s not a video game, see? It’s a virtual friend and “TV enhancer”. And once R.O.B. had helped crowbar Nintendo into homes, he was quickly forgotten.
Third on their list of selling points, to cap it all off, Nintendo needed a strong pack-in game from the beginning. That would get American consumers interested. And there it was, not just one but two games – Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. We’ll get onto the anatine quacky-quacky-shooty-shooty soon; another game that spurned the traditional controller-to-games-console setup with its iconic NES Zapper light-gun.
The real gem to be found in the package was Super Mario Bros. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t the first Mario game available for your home console. But it might just as well be, since Mario Bros. Arcade is that bit too dismal.
I’m conscious of the fact that time ain’t getting any slower for me, and I now have to recognise a new social ill called Generation Z. But really, I don’t see how even the most obnoxious zoomer could fail to recognise this game. Nintendo still beats us over the head with Super Mario Bros. nostalgia to this day. And we still lap it up, judging by the box office figures made by the Mario movie this year.
But why wouldn’t they be fixated on this game? With 8 entire worlds of 4 levels apiece, plus the fact that the levels even span more than one screen in a side-scrolling fashion, Super Mario Bros. was unprecedented in scale for 1985.
This wasn’t just one fuzzy Atari screen, this was a grand platforming adventure. To gamers young and old at the time, it must have been like that Train Pulling into a Station short film from the 1800s, where the train hurtles towards the screen and causes the terrified first-time viewers to jump out of the way.
You even had a lovingly composed soundtrack, for God’s sake, with the main Ground Theme being surely the most famous song in all of gaming – and we’ll really know we’re old when TikTokers out there start failing to recognise it.
I’ve often lamented not being an 80s child, although that could put me close to 40 years old today so one has to count one’s blessings. Still, I’d love to have been there right from the off in terms of gaming, the Big Bang event of gaming as it were.
Things like the Atari, Intellivision and ColecoVision were pretty popular in the USA, and indeed we had the Sinclair Speccy, Amstrad (Lord Sugar’s pride and joy) and Commodore over here, or in the UK moreso. But, I have to be honest, that’s not where gaming started for me. The beepy boopy rubbish of the late 70s and early 80s was just the precursor – really, the whole gig started with the Nintendo and Super Mario Bros.
Why else would Nintendo be thriving today, alongside later entrants to the console market Microsoft and Sony, while leather companies from Connecticut went tits up? To say nothing of how Atari completely failed to make the grade coming into the 90s.
As a game rather than a historical piece, SMB is simple, sometimes rough, but you’ll know you’re in the presence of greatness and you’ll shut up accordingly. You wouldn’t loudly talk over a war hero’s greatest story, and it’s the same deal here.
The game’s bloody harder than you might think as well. Top gamesters like me are aware of a crafty little cheat where you can hold A and press Start after a Game Over, which will let you start over from whichever world you’ve just been bounced out of.
It really is a necessity to know that one, because otherwise you could be right on Bowser’s door and lose the last of your measly three lives. If that happens, then oops, back to a silent title screen for you.
Not everyone’s beaten this game, you know, because once you get to that fiendish eighth world, you’ll have Hammer Bros throwing kitchen sinks at you and you’re damned if you can find a safe place to stand. And speaking of the eighth world, you’ll never forget the first time you realise that Mario can run right over gaps of one block in width, setting him up for even greater jumps.
Look, being honest, the movement and jumping physics that Mario exhibited here have been refined dozens of times over the last 35 years, and coming back to play this particular game after having a sweet slice of physics cake like Super Mario World or Super Mario Galaxy 2 may get you a little frustrated.
But this game’s importance could not be overstated. It is the daddy, the precursor, the top of the food chain. What Atari and E.T. killed, Nintendo and Mario revived. The portly plumber’s come a long way, yet he still hasn’t relinquished his crown as the most famous gaming character of all time.
If you could only time-travel back to 1985, or 1981 even, and take a punt on Nintendo stock early… although knowing my luck, I’d probably shoot Nintendo down like one of those poor duckies on the other half of the cartridge.
21 July 2023