Super Mario Bros. is the 1985 NES platform game directed and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the successor to the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. and the first game in the Super Mario series. It is the game that saved the console business in America, and it did so with a first level so carefully built that it teaches you everything you need without a single word of instruction. Everything else in the genre descends from it.
The Mushroom Kingdom
You control Mario, or Luigi in the two-player mode, through side-scrolling stages of the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool from King Koopa, later renamed Bowser. You avoid enemies and pits and collect power-ups: the Super Mushroom that makes you big, the Fire Flower that lets you throw fireballs, and the Starman that makes you briefly invincible. That is the vocabulary, and the game introduces every word of it in World 1-1.
The First Level
Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka designed World 1-1 as a tutorial for platform gameplay, and it is the most studied level in the medium. The first enemy walks toward you so you learn to jump. The first block gives you a mushroom that moves away so you learn to chase it. The first pit is small. By the end of the level a player who has never held a controller knows how the game works, and no menu ever had to tell them.
The Feel
The engine came from Miyamoto’s team’s experience with Devil World and the side-scrollers Excitebike and Kung Fu, and the smooth scrolling and Mario’s acceleration from a walk to a run are the reason the game feels alive. Momentum is the whole design. A running jump goes farther, a longer press goes higher, and the relationship between the button and the character is so direct that it has never been improved, only imitated.
The Ambition
Miyamoto wanted a more colorful platform game with a scrolling screen and larger characters than the arcades were offering, and he got it. Eight worlds, underground and underwater stages, castles, warp zones and secrets tucked into blocks gave the game a scale that no home platformer had approached. Koji Kondo’s music, the most recognizable in games, is the last piece.
Where It Falls Short
The later worlds lean on memorization and cheap deaths, and the difficulty curve in the last two is steep enough to feel punitive. The underwater stages are the weak point of the design and always were. And a modern player will find it spare, because it is: it was the template, not the finished house.
The Verdict
Super Mario Bros. is the most important platform game ever made and, forty years on, still one of the best to actually play. Its first level is a masterclass. Its whole is a foundation.
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