Super Mario Bros 1 is an all time classic. It is one of the games that defines gaming for many people and brings to mind many happy memories. I played the game on the NES a lot as a kid, and I have also talked about my love of the arcade version known as Vs, Super Mario Bros. The original Super Mario Bros is one of the first two games I ever played, along with the original Legend of Zelda, though I am not sure which I played first. There is something about Super Mario Bros that is timeless, whether it is the visuals, the music or the gameplay, Super Mario Bros has that IT factor.
It is also important to remember how influential this game was. It changed how platform games would work and laid the groundwork for the genre’s future. Games like Sonic The Hedgehog, Donkey Kong Country, Wonder Boy and more. It was not the first sidescroller, that honour belongs to Jump Bug, instead Super Mario Bros, was the game that perfected the sidescroller and made it a mainstream genre. No two playthroughs of the game are alike, as speedrunners constantly compete to find new ways to complete the game faster, while other players decide what route to take and how much of the game they want to see at any time.
There are plenty of secrets to find here and players are still finding new ones in fact. The infamous minus world is not the only level of its kind in the game, and more like it are constantly being discovered. My favourite way of playing the game is either on the NES or the SNES version in Super Mario All Stars. For some reason, despite the latter being simply an upgraded version of the former, I get a different sense of experience when I play and I do not get this experience when playing on the NES. I enjoy both versions for what they bring, but both versions have a lasting charm that deserve multiple playthroughs/ Playing through the All Stars version again recently on the Switch, I once more felt that sense of wonder that I first felt when playing on my SNES back when I was a kid. Yes there are the memes of the princess being in another castle, but the game was deeper than that, and to truly master Super Mario Bros was to do more than just beat the game. Nintendo had a masterpiece with this game and the timeless nature of it has allowed many new generations to discover it and be enthralled as well.
35 years after its original release, Super Mario Bros is still a classic and the legacy it created is still going strong today. This is a game that any indie dev should study so they can understand game design and how to truly polish the experience for years to come. It was amazing then, and it will remain amazing for another 35 years to come. That is a testament to excellent game design.
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