Play Super Mario Bros
Shay Silvertooth
This week's Retronauts episode tackles Super Mario Bros. 3, which many people consider the greatest Mario ever. Some even say greatest game ever, because they like making wild, bold claims. It's definitely a game any serious fan of video game history should have access to. Please allow us to offer our recommendations on how to acquire a copy.
Super Mario Bros. 3 originally showed up on NES in 1990, and that version has been reproduced most frequently in the years since. Currently Nintendo makes the game available on three different platforms, with one kind of outlier. This is the "true" version of the game, so it's the one purists will want, but unfortunately has made it difficult to buy a proper, satisfying conversion of the game.
The Wii Virtual Console rendition is mostly tolerable, since you can play it on a CRT television in its proper resolution. That makes the graphics look sharp, and you don't have to struggle with input lag. But it looks awful on an HDTV, with overly dark visuals, and upscaling lag means the controls will feel sluggish and slow.
Super Mario Bros. 3 doesn't suffer from lag on 3DS, but it have that annoying flaw common to all of Nintendo's NES ports to 3DS VC: You can't force it to true-pixel resolution. While this doesn't affect how the game plays, it does make those wonderful graphics look blurry and distorted.
On the plus side, Wii U VC means you can play Super Mario Bros. 3 on either a television or on Game Pad. That's good! Unfortunately, it looks terrible on TVs, with even darker colors than on Wii and fuzzier pixels than on 3DS. The visuals fare better with off-screen play, but there is a tiny amount of lag on Game Pad.
Nintendo remade all four 8-bit Super Mario games in 1994 for Super NES in the Super Mario All-Stars collection. (If you're really cool, hunt down a copy of the pack-in cartridge that added in Super Mario World!) This take on the game includes a few extremely tiny physics modifications to go along with its wonderfully overhauled graphics and music.
This package pretty amounted to a Super NES game in a Virtual Console emulation wrapper sold as a full-price retail release. A questionable business tactic, perhaps, but it does amount to a faithful recreation of the All-Stars version of Mario 3 that runs on Wii or Wii U. That's not too bad. On the other hand, it sells for about $20 at minimum, which is about three or four times as expensive as the Virtual Console editions. So that is bad.
The Wii U's Virtual Console for Game Boy Advance games is great, and this release is the high water mark for the format. Yes, Super Mario Advance 4 makes some frustrating changes to the Super Mario All-Stars rendition of Super Mario 3. But! This version of the game includes all of the eReader add-on card content. Some of that material was exclusive to retailers like Wal-Mart, and the original GBA cart couldn't actually store the data for every eReader card at once. In other words, this rendition of Super Mario Advance 4 is actually better than the original cart! While purists won't approve of its technical compromises, it's a wonderful and entertaining adaptation of an NES classic.
My recommendation would be to check out the GBA Virtual Console release for Wii U. It's a fresh and interesting take on the game, especially if you've never played the eReader content (which is basically a pile of super-weird bonus stages that predate Super Mario Maker by more than a decade). If you want the original NES game, though, 3DS Virtual Console is probably your best bet if you weren't lucky enough to acquire a Classic NES Edition.
Super Mario Bros.[b] is a platform game developed and published in 1985 by Nintendo for the Famicom in Japan and for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America. It is the successor to the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. and the first game in the Super Mario series. Following a US test market release for the NES, it was converted to international arcades on the Nintendo VS. System in early 1986. The NES version received a wide release in North America that year and in PAL regions in 1987.
Players control Mario, or his brother Luigi in the multiplayer mode, to explore the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool from King Koopa (later named Bowser). They traverse side-scrolling stages while avoiding hazards such as enemies and pits with the aid of power-ups such as the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Starman.
The game was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka as "a grand culmination" of the Famicom team's three years of game mechanics and programming, drawing from their experiences working on Devil World and the side-scrollers Excitebike and Kung Fu to advance their previous work on platforming "athletic games" such as Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. The design of the first level, World 1-1, is a tutorial for platform gameplay.
Super Mario Bros. is frequently cited as one of the greatest video games of all time, and is particularly admired for its precise controls. It has been re-released on most Nintendo systems, and is one of the bestselling games of all time, with more than 58 million copies sold worldwide. It is credited alongside the NES as one of the key factors in reviving the video game industry after the 1983 crash, and helped popularize the side-scrolling platform game genre. Koji Kondo's soundtrack is one of the earliest and most popular in video games, making music a centerpiece of game design and has since been considered one of the best video game soundtracks of all time as a result. Mario has become prominent in popular culture, and Super Mario Bros. began a multimedia franchise including a long-running game series, an animated television series, a Japanese anime feature film, a live-action feature film and an animated feature film.
Super Mario Bros. was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka of the Nintendo Creative Department, and largely programmed by Toshihiko Nakago of SRD Company, Ltd, which became a longtime Nintendo partner and later a wholly owned subsidiary.[9][10] The original Mario Bros., released in 1983, is an arcade platformer that takes place on a single screen with a black background. Miyamoto used the term "athletic games" to refer to what would later be known as platform games. For Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto wanted to create a more colorful "athletic game" with a scrolling screen and larger characters.[9]
Development was a culmination of their technical knowledge from working on the 1984 games Devil World, Excitebike and Kung Fu along with their desire to further advance the platforming "athletic game" genre they had created with their earlier games.[11] The side-scrolling gameplay of racing game Excitebike and beat 'em up game Kung-Fu Master, the latter ported by Miyamoto's team to the NES as Kung Fu, were key steps towards Miyamoto's vision of an expansive side-scrolling platformer;[12] in turn, Kung-Fu Master was an adaptation of the Jackie Chan film Wheels on Meals (1984).[13] While working on Excitebike and Kung Fu, he came up with the concept of a platformer that would have the player "strategize while scrolling sideways" over long distances, have aboveground and underground levels, and have colorful backgrounds rather than black backgrounds.[14] Super Mario Bros. used the fast scrolling game engine Miyamoto's team had originally developed for Excitebike, which allowed Mario to smoothly accelerate from a walk to a run, rather than move at a constant speed like in earlier platformers.[15]
Miyamoto also wanted to create a game that would be the "final exclamation point" for the ROM cartridge format before the forthcoming Famicom Disk System was released.[11] Development for Super Mario Bros. began in the fall of 1984 at the same time as The Legend of Zelda,[16] another Famicom game directed and designed by Miyamoto and released in Japan five months later, and the games shared some elements; for instance, the fire bars that appear in the Mario castle levels began as objects in Zelda.[17]
To have a new game available for the end-of-year shopping season, Nintendo aimed for simplicity.[18] In December 1984, the team created a prototype in which the player moved a 16x32-pixel rectangle around a single screen.[19] Tezuka suggested using Mario after seeing the sales figures of Mario Bros.[16] In February 1985, the team chose the name Super Mario Bros. after implementing the Super Mushroom power-up.[20][19] The game initially used a concept in which Mario or Luigi could fly a rocket ship while firing at enemies, but this went unused;[21] the final game's sky-based bonus stages are a remnant of this concept.[11][22] The team found it illogical that Mario was hurt by stomping on turtles in Mario Bros. so decided that future Mario games would "definitely have it so that you could jump on turtles all you want".[11] Miyamoto initially imagined Bowser as an ox, inspired by the Ox King from the Toei Animation film Alakazam the Great (1960). However, Tezuka decided he looked more like a turtle, and they collaborated to create his final design.[23]
The development of Super Mario Bros. is an early example of specialization in the video game industry, made possible and necessary by the Famicom's arcade-capable hardware. Miyamoto designed the game world and led a team of seven programmers and artists who turned his ideas into code, sprites, music, and sound effects.[24] Developers of previous hit games joined the team in February 1985, importing many special programming techniques, features, and design refinements such as these: "Donkey Kong's slopes, lifts, conveyor belts, and ladders; Donkey Kong Jr.'s ropes, logs and springs; and Mario Bros.'s enemy attacks, enemy movement, frozen platforms and POW Blocks".[25][26]
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