Super Mario Bros Wii Gameplay
Marketta Filipovich
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]
The team based the level design around a small Mario, intending to later make his size bigger in the final version, but they decided it would be fun to let Mario change his size via a power-up. The early level design was focused on teaching players that mushrooms were distinct from Goombas and would be beneficial to them, so in World 1-1, the first mushroom is difficult to avoid if it is released.[27] The use of mushrooms to change size was influenced by Japanese folktales in which people wander into forests and eat magical mushrooms; this also resulted in the game world being named the "Mushroom Kingdom". The team had Mario begin levels as small Mario to make obtaining a mushroom more gratifying.[20] Miyamoto explained: "When we made the prototype of the big Mario, we did not feel he was big enough. So, we came up with the idea of showing the smaller Mario first, who could be made bigger later in the game; then players could see and feel that he was bigger."[28] Miyamoto denied rumors that developers implemented a small Mario after a bug caused only his upper half to appear.[20] Miyamoto said the shell-kicking 1-up trick was carefully tested, but "people turned out to be a lot better at pulling the trick off for ages on end than we thought".[11] Other features, such as blocks containing multiple coins, were inspired by programming glitches.[28]
Super Mario Bros. was developed for a cartridge with 256 kilobits (32KiB) of program code and data and 64 kilobits (8KiB) of sprite and background graphics.[25] Due to this storage limitation, the designers happily considered their aggressive search for space-saving opportunities to be akin to their own fun television game show competition.[25] For instance, clouds and bushes in the game's backgrounds use that same sprite recolored,[17] and background tiles are generated via an automatic algorithm.[29] Sound effects were also recycled; the sound when Mario is damaged is the same as when he enters a pipe, and Mario jumping on an enemy is the same sound as each stroke when swimming.[18] After completing the game, the development team decided that they should introduce players with a simple, easy-to-defeat enemy rather than beginning the game with Koopa Troopas. By this point, the project had nearly run out of memory, so the designers created the Goombas by making a single static image and flipping it back and forth to save space while creating a convincing character animation.[30] After the addition of the game's music, around 20 bytes of open cartridge space remained. Miyamoto used this remaining space to add a sprite of a crown into the game, which would appear in the player's life counter as a reward for obtaining at least 10 lives.[25]
During the third generation of video game consoles, tutorials on gameplay were rare. Instead, level design teaches players how a video game works. The opening section of Super Mario Bros. was therefore specifically designed in such a way that players would be forced to explore the mechanics of the game to be able to advance. Rather than confront the newly oriented player with obstacles, the first level of Super Mario Bros. lays down the variety of in-game hazards by means of repetition, iteration, and escalation.[31] In an interview with Eurogamer, Miyamoto explained that he created World 1-1 to contain everything a player needs to "gradually and naturally understand what they're doing", so that they can quickly understand how the game works. According to Miyamoto, once players understand the mechanics of the game, they can play more freely and it becomes "their game".[32][33]