Super Mario Bros.

First Goomba	Down a bonus pipe	Now THAT's Fire Power
Fire bars	King Koopa!	Cheap shot

"Why are all the colours different between shots?" The NES had a weird way of displaying colour, and pretty much all emulators interpret it differently. 3 of these shots were taken with VirtuaNES on 3DS, 2 were taken with FCE Ultra, 1 was taken with Nestopia.

In the Mushroom Kingdom's grand début, King Koopa has kidnapped poor Princess Toadstool and 7 of her closest advisors, and has left his Koopa Clan to crawl around the kingdom. It's up to Mario and Luigi, our heroes from Brooklyn, to save the kingdom and send the Koopas packing.

What can I say? It's Super Mario Bros.! The Star Wars of videogaming, it's been re-released 13 times at the time of writing on nearly every system Nintendo has ever made. It's even shown up on its own on a weird dedicated handheld system that was only available for about 6 months in 2020, and in a shovelware compilation in 2016. It's been licensed in nearly every conceivable facet of popular culture, from Saturday morning cartoons to films, from breakfast cereal to shampoo, from boardgames to dog toys, if it can be mass-produced for sale, there's a good chance Super Mario Bros. has been seen there.

This wasn't the first game to feature the eponymous brothers; Mario's first appearance was in 1981 as the protagonist of Donkey Kong, while Luigi's début was in 1983's Mario Bros. The title of Super Mario Bros. was 2-fold: first, it was a bigger game with a longer adventure than simply kicking enemies around in a sewer junction; second, the Brothers had to manifest superpowers in order to fight the Koopa Clan, such as shrinking when hit, touching flowers to gain fire power, touching stars to become invulnerable, and falling from great heights without even recoiling upon landing. Whether the brothers are capable of this outside the Mushroom Kingdom is debateable, but it isn't strictly relevant here.

I remember seeing Super Mario Bros. being played when I was a kid, and not being moved by it. To my eyes and ears, it was just another computer program that kids would use instead of playing Crash Dummies or LEGOs. Until encountering Super Mario World in 1st grade, I never gave videogames much thought. Hearing the term conjured images of great hulking joysticks connected to IBM-compatibles that people would use to play colourless games about Hell and death (imagine my surprise when I started playing Doom myself in 2015! But we're not talking about that), not the colourful toys and markers I would play with. My first 1-on-1 encounter with the game was in 1999, when it was rereleased on Game Boy Color. Not that far into the future for an adult, but a lifetime and a half for a kid. At that point, I'd played Super NES, owned a Nintendo 64, a Game Boy Pocket, and a Game Boy Color. I recall completing it, because I unlocked the "For Super Players" mode and had all 7 Toads and Princess Peach standing in the Activity Room. It wouldn't be until the Primary Acquisition Phase in 2010, when I was keelhauling the internet for NES ROMs to play on FCEUX on Windows XP that I would play the original NES version (yes, the very same computer I made NITS.JPG on... oh, you're not from Tumblr, are you? Well, never mind).

When it comes to Mario games, Super Mario Bros. isn't my favourite by any standard, but I do like playing it. It has the misfortune of my having played the Super Mario All-Stars version first, so I had become accustomed to the Super NES-style graphics and sound by the time I got to the square waves and 3-colour sprites. However, through Deluxe, it was the first version of the game that I personally owned, and, by the time I got round to getting All-Stars (the Wii version for Mario's 25th), I already had the NES original on Wii Virtual Console. I liked how I didn't need a controller for it, I could just turn the Wii Remote to the side and hold it like an NES controller. I remember watching The Muppet Movie on Wii Netflix one night, then immediately playing Super Mario Bros. without even changing seats. Yes, I have some good memories of my Wii.

10/10, would recommend without reservations. Fortunately, if you're the type who likes to throw money at huge multinational corporations on a continual basis, Super Mario Bros. is available right now on Nintendo Switch Online, just the basic subscription. You know, for a change, I'm actually glad that it's available on this platform, because it allows the long-discontinued NES to maintain a consistent presence in popular culture. You don't have to wonder how videogames used to be "back in the day", you can find out for yourself, and all it costs is your soul— er, uh, I mean, $20 plus however much the game costs. While it's a pretty good bet that anyone who has a Nintendo Switch and about 90% of the gaming population at large has played Super Mario Bros., if you're one of today's lucky 10.000, then you owe it to yourself to try it out! Whether you go with an NSO subscription or one of the free options available to the more cunning netizens is up to you. For legal reasons, I shall only recommend the subscription service.