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Almost exactly 35 years ago, Super Mario Bros., Nintendo’s iconic video game, debuted, turning a high-jumping plumber named Mario into the Japanese video game company’s equivalent of Mickey Mouse.
In 1985, Super Mario Bros. was revealing. The game, which popularized Nintendo’s first home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, was played as a challenging, dreamlike cartoon scrolling across a television screen. Players controlled Mario, making him run, jump, or sometimes swim through levels filled with giant mushrooms, menacing turtles, and other bizarre obstacles. It was a difficult game, but not too difficult to dissuade his avid players from trying again. And other. And other.
A sequel followed (which has its own fascinating story). And other. And other.
The latest Mario game, Super Mario Bros. 35, which launched Thursday for the Nintendo Switch, allows 35 people to play the original Super Mario Bros. simultaneously, each vying to be the last Mario standing. It is a kind of Super Mario and Fortnite.
Here are 35 things to consider about the plumber who’s overdoing it.
1. First, it’s Super Mario Bros. who is 35 years old, not Mario. He is 39 years old. Mario debuted in 1981 in another famous Nintendo game, Donkey Kong, in which he runs up a series of beams, jumps barrels and climbs ladders to rescue a woman kidnapped by a giant ape.
2. In the early years of video games, characters were less defined by who they were than by what they could do. Pac-Man gobbled dots and chased, or was haunted by, ghosts. Sonic ran fast. Mario jumped. In fact, before the creators of Donkey Kong called him Mario, they called him “jumpman.”
3. Mario is so famous that even his brother, Luigi (playable in Super Mario Bros. in two-player mode), is a superstar. Luigi has more personality; he is a nervous worried and underdog in the shadow of his famous brother. Nintendo marketed 2013 as the Year of Luigi. Did you celebrate?
4. It is not clear what Mario’s last name is. At times, Nintendo officials have said that it is Mario (hence Mario and Luigi being the “Mario Bros.”), which would make him Mario Mario. Other times they have said they don’t have one.
5. There is also Wario, a kind of evil Mario, with an unknown relationship. He has starred in more than a dozen games, including Wario Land and WarioWare.
6. There is even a Waluigi. He has not starred in anything.
7. Since modern games are less based on pet characters, Mario stands out as a relic. Major video games are still popular because of what you do in them, but something like Fortnite doesn’t tie your main actions to a singular iconic character.
8. Even Nintendo doesn’t have many characters these days. They are busy taking advantage of the old ones. In fact, they are diversifying Mario into animated movies and Universal Studios-backed theme parks.
9. The theme song to Super Mario Bros. by composer Koji Kondo might be the most recognizable tune in games. Doo-doot-doo da-doot doo!
10. The essence of the entire Super Mario Bros. gaming experience can be understood through the arc of a leap: the rise for discovery, the descent for conquest. The first delightful discovery of the original game comes in its first few seconds, when the player makes Mario jump and bang his head on a floating block. A mushroom appears with the power to enlarge Mario. And when Mario first encounters some crawling enemies, he can only defeat them by jumping on them.
11. Mario’s reputation as an avid jumper has allowed Nintendo to transform him into an avatar of exuberance. He stars in a series of spinoff games, each with a cartoonish take on its genre. Mario Kart is a racing game that allows you to throw banana peels onto the track. Mario Tennis is supercharged tennis. You can guess how Super Mario Party goes.
12. There is even a line of Mario games that involve exaggerated takes from the Olympics. Mario & Sonic at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, released in 2019, sees Mario and his friends compete in over-the-top contests for an Olympic Games that were postponed as a result of the pandemic.
13. The colorful and upbeat vibe of Mario games has at times caused Nintendo to be out of step with gaming trends. In 2003, the most popular game franchise was Grand Theft Auto, which gave players the ability to steal cars and kill almost anyone, including prostitutes. Cue George Harrison, a former Nintendo executive, awkwardly defending his brand at a press conference: “Mario will never start shooting prostitutes.”
14. Mario’s joy remains unstoppable. These days, Mario and Grand Theft Auto can sit side by side on their popularity.
15. Mario’s magnificent strangeness also survives. The initial dreamy quality of your game worlds extends to the modern Mario sequels in which, for example, you can throw your hat on a dinosaur and own it.
16. If you think these Mario things are strange, you are in good company. In 2012, a New York Times text editor asked me to clarify why Super Mario collects coins. To get them? Get a free life after every 100 coins? Why did the designers put the coins in the games to guide the players through the levels?
17. The original Super Mario Bros. contains what might be the most famous video game shortcut: an intentional exploit in which Mario can break through the ceiling of the game’s first underground level and enter pipes that lead to later parts of the game. That shortcut embodies one of the core truths of games, whether you’re playing God of War or Candy Crush: Players are always looking for ways to beat the system.
18. There are two main styles of Mario games. The so-called 2D games feature a Mario who runs across the screen from left to right. The revolutionary 1996 game Super Mario 64 took the series into three dimensions and brought much of the video game industry with it. (In Mario 64, players see Mario from behind as he runs forward.) Nintendo’s big September release, Super Mario 3D All-Stars, for Switch, is a compilation of Mario 64 and two 3D successors: Super Mario Sunshine, from 2002, and Super Mario Galaxy, from 2007.
19. Mario game designers rarely smell bad. The closest thing to disaster they have come to is Super Mario Sunshine, who carries Mario with a backpack that spews water. It’s okay.
20. Super Mario Galaxy is divine. His main idea: to set Mario’s adventures in small, spherical worlds and let Mario jump or fly from one to another.
21. Mario popularized 3D games but also made 2D games popular again. In 2006, Nintendo broke a 16-year 2D Marios drought with the release of New Super Mario Bros. Its popularity challenged the conventional wisdom of the medium that artistic progress must be in sync with technological advancements.
22. Three decades of Mario sequels exemplify how video games have generally become easier or how they are now designed to better respect a player’s time. The early games severely limited Mario’s number of lives, or the number of opportunities players had to retry a level. The most recent releases of Mario make it easy to stock up on additional attempts. Super Mario Odyssey, released in 2017, can’t even trigger a Game Over. That means that even when Mario loses all of their lives, players can pick up where they left off, without a significant penalty.
23. Previously, Super Mario Galaxy offered another innovation in the game’s difficulty: a “co-star” mode that allowed a second player to use a second controller to assist the main player.
24. Like nothing else in games, the Mario franchise embodies the tension between corporate ownership and fandom. Fans have created countless unofficial Mario games, many of them later abandoned by Nintendo’s lawyers.
25. If you can’t sue them, sell them something. In 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker, which allows players to create, but not own, their own 2D Mario levels.
26. Even Nintendo recreates the classic sequences from Super Mario Bros. Its best riff might be a circular version of Super Mario Bros. ‘first level, featured on WarioWare: Twisted, in 2004.
27. Mario games have helped popularize the grassroots speedrunning scene, in which expert gamers use every tricks imaginable to complete games as quickly as possible. Super Mario Bros. races run in less than five minutes are dazzling races with near-death success. New records are set in hundredths of a second.
28. Mario games have inspired the lovely Super Mario Broth, a Mario Darkness Twitter feed that recently revealed a detail about Mario’s irises.
29. Some superfans have proposed that all Mario games exist on a narrative timeline. It doesn’t work at all.
30. Some Mario games are a bit retrograde. The thin plots of the three Mario games in the new 3D All-Stars collection, for example, show Mario rescuing a kidnapped Princess Peach.
31. Princess Peach has been a protagonist at times, with mixed results. She was a playable character in Super Mario Bros. 2, in 1988, and in Super Mario 3D World, which will soon be remade. Nintendo gave her a starring role in 2005 in Super Princess Peach, in which she rescues a kidnapped Mario. Her powers in that game? Your mood swings. Players can piss her off to surround her with flames that clear obstacles and make her cry to use her tears to grow plants.
32. Mario games highlight the industry’s conservation issues. The games run on hardware that often becomes obsolete within a decade, making it difficult to play the classics. While fans and conservationists collect and share copied copies, copyright holders exercise the power to ensure or not that games remain accessible. When it comes to that original Super Mario Bros., Nintendo does the job of making sure it works on their newest devices and is enthusiastically selling it to every new generation of customers.
33. On the other hand, Nintendo first sold Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube, which went out of production in 2007. That game also ran on the Wii, which was retired around 2012. Since then, no new video game hardware could play Sunshine until now. 3D All-Stars collection of the month on Switch. If the main Mario games can be so inaccessible, imagine how quickly the lesser known games disappear.
34. Nintendo is a popular but also strange company, known for being an engine of brilliant creativity and strange policies. Test # 1452 (probably): Nintendo says it will only sell its new collection of 3D Mario games (as well as Super Mario Bros. 35) until March 31.
35. And finally: Mario’s best jump? I nominate the triple jump from Super Mario 64: a trio of high arc jumps, accompanied by three dizzying screams. That might be the best gaming ever.
