Super Mario Bros.
is a 1985 platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Directed and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, it is the successor to the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. and the first game in the Super Mario series. Players control Mario, or his brother Luigi in the multiplayer mode, to traverse the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool from King Koopa. They traverse side-scrolling stages while avoiding hazards such as enemies and pits and collecting power-ups such as the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Starman.
Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka designed Super Mario Bros. as a culmination of the team's experience working on Devil World and the side-scrollers Excitebike and Kung Fu. Miyamoto wanted to create a more colorful platform game with a scrolling screen and larger characters. The team designed the first level, World 1-1, as a tutorial for platform gameplay. Koji Kondo's soundtrack is one of the earliest in video games, making music a centerpiece of the design.
Super Mario Bros. was released in September 1985 in Japan for the Famicom, the Japanese version of the NES. 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 was released in North America that year and in PAL regions in 1987. It has been rereleased on most Nintendo systems.
Super Mario Bros. is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential video games of all time, and is particularly admired for its precise controls. It is one of the best-selling games, with more than copies sold worldwide. Alongside the NES, it is credited as a key factor in reviving the video game industry after the 1983 crash, and helped popularize the side-scrolling platform genre. The soundtrack is often named among the best video game soundtracks. 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.
Gameplay
Super Mario Bros. is a platform game in which the player controls the titular protagonist Mario, who is tasked with exploring the Mushroom Kingdom to defeat Bowser and rescue Princess Toadstool. His brother, Luigi, is controlled by the second player in multiplayer mode and assumes the same plot role and functionality as Mario. The game takes place through a side-scrolling perspective where the player moves to the right to reach the flagpole at the end of each level.The Mushroom Kingdom includes coins for Mario to collect and special bricks marked with a question mark, which when hit from below by Mario may reveal more coins or a special item. Other "secret", often invisible, bricks may contain more coins or rare items. If the player gains a Super Mushroom, Mario grows to double his size and gains the ability to break bricks above him. The item protects Mario from a single instance of damage inflicted by an enemy or hazard, though falling off the map will always kill Mario. Players start with a certain number of lives and may gain extra lives by picking up green spotted 1-Up Mushrooms hidden in bricks, collecting 100 coins, defeating several enemies in a row with a Koopa shell, or bouncing on enemies successively without touching the ground. The player may also spawn hidden bricks with lives by collecting every coin in the previous world's third level, or by warping there. Mario loses a life if he takes damage while small, falls off the screen, or runs out of time. The game ends when the player runs out of lives, although holding the "A" button can be used on the game over screen to respawn from the first level of the world in which the player died.
Mario's primary attack is jumping onto enemies, though many enemies have differing responses to this. For example, a Goomba will flatten and be defeated, while a Koopa Troopa will temporarily retract into its shell, allowing Mario to use it as a projectile. These shells may be deflected off a wall to defeat other enemies, though they can also bounce back against Mario, which will damage him. Other enemies, such as underwater foes and enemies with spiked tops, cannot be jumped on and damage the player instead. Mario can also defeat enemies above him by jumping to hit the brick that the enemy is standing on. Mario may also acquire the Fire Flower from certain "?" blocks that when picked up changes the color of Super Mario's outfit and allows him to throw fireballs. A less common item is the Starman, which often appears when Mario hits certain concealed or otherwise invisible blocks. This item grants Mario temporary invincibility from all minor dangers.
The game consists of eight worlds, each with four sub-levels or stages. Underwater stages contain unique aquatic enemies. Bonuses and secret areas include more coins, or warp pipes that allow Mario to skip directly to later worlds. The final stage of each world is in a fiery underground castle where Bowser is fought on a suspension bridge above lava; the first seven of these Bowsers are actually minions disguised as him, and the real Bowser is in the eighth world. Bowser and his decoys are defeated by jumping over them or running under them while they are jumping and reaching the axe on the end of the bridge, or with fireballs. After completing the game once, the player is rewarded with the ability to replay with increased difficulty, such as all Goombas replaced with Buzzy Beetles, enemies similar to Koopa Troopas who cannot be defeated using the Fire Flower.
Plot
Following the events of Mario Bros., the game is set in the fantasy land of the Mushroom Kingdom after Mario and Luigi had arrived through a clay pipe from New York City.In the Mushroom Kingdom, a tribe of turtle-like Koopa Troopas invade the kingdom and uses the magic of their king Bowser to turn the Mushroom People into inanimate objects such as bricks, stones, and horsehair plants. Bowser and his army also kidnap Princess Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom, the only one with the ability to reverse Bowser's spell. After hearing the news, the brothers set out to save the princess and free the kingdom from Bowser. They fight Bowser's forces while traversing the Mushroom Kingdom. After each defeat of a decoy Bowser, a Toad retainer proclaims, "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!". Finally, they reach Bowser's true stronghold, where they defeat him by throwing fireballs or by dropping him into lava, freeing the princess and saving the Mushroom Kingdom.
Development
Super Mario Bros. was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka of the Nintendo Creative Department, and largely programmed by Toshihiko Nakago of SRD, which became a longtime Nintendo partner and later a wholly owned subsidiary. 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.Development was a culmination of the team's technical knowledge after 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. The side-scrolling gameplay of the racing game Excitebike and the 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; in turn, Kung-Fu Master was an adaptation of the Jackie Chan film Wheels on Meals. 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. 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. Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani has stated that Miyamoto had told him personally that an earlier scrolling platformer using Iwatani's character, Pac-Land, was an influence on Super Mario Bros.
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. Development for Super Mario Bros. began in the fall of 1984 at the same time as The Legend of Zelda, 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.
To have a new game available for the end-of-year shopping season, Nintendo aimed for simplicity. In December 1984, the team created a prototype in which the player moved a 16x32-pixel rectangle around a single screen. Tezuka suggested using Mario after seeing the sales figures of Mario Bros. In February 1985, the team chose the name Super Mario Bros. after implementing the Super Mushroom power-up. The game initially used a concept in which Mario or Luigi could fly a rocket ship while firing at enemies, but this went unused; the final game's sky-based bonus stages are a remnant of this concept. 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". Miyamoto initially imagined Bowser as an ox, inspired by the Ox King from the Toei Animation film Alakazam the Great. However, Tezuka decided he looked more like a turtle, and they collaborated to create his final design.
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. Developers of previous hit games joined the team in February 1985, importing many special programming techniques, features, and design refinements such as these: "Donkey Kongs 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".
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. 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. 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." Miyamoto denied rumors that developers implemented a small Mario after a bug caused only his upper half to appear. 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". Other features, such as blocks containing multiple coins, were inspired by programming glitches.
Super Mario Bros. was developed for a cartridge with 256 kilobits of program code and data and 64 kilobits of sprite and background graphics. 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. For instance, clouds and bushes in the game's backgrounds use that same sprite recolored, and background tiles are generated via an automatic algorithm. Around July 1985, development time was extended to 3–4 weeks to adjust and fix memory bugs. 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. 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. 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. After filling up left-over space, the game was released to manufacturing in August 1985.