"There are a very few moments in video game history you can point to and say, 'this is where everything changed.' Super Mario Brothers is one of them. 8/10"
@@Grandtank1999 We all joke "Oh haha, Mario's a game for kids," but no, this game goes hard. It is a right bastard, and clearing it without the use of warp zones is a badge of honor in my book.
@@lilwyvern4The fact I’ve made it tradition to do that once a year says I either have way too much spare time, or I’ve gotten really good at Mario. Both? Both probably
I was a kid when we arrived at Liverpool (a chain store) in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. That day left an everlasting impression in me, as there was this big TV and a little crowd of kids and some adults around it. My dad and I took a peek and my world changed forever: there it was, in a time of single-screen arcades and simple Atari graphics, a game so full of colors, music and scrolling. Mario, jumping, running and growing, breaking blocks, going thru large worlds with wild scenery. It looked like nothing I seen before and that emotion, that sense of discovery, that everything had changed forever I've never felt again in my life with the same amazement, as only kids can feel. Thus is the significance of Super Mario Bros. in my life.
The context of Super Mario Bros. as the ultimate cartridge game is fascinating. Puts some things into perspective. Thanks for the awesome video as always!
@@Gadzooki Considering some of the games that came before and it was kinda true. Most were basically arcade games, and didn't give much adventure(and the ones that did were basically arcade games with the theory to kill you every 2 minutes still there or as he mentioned in the vid terrible controls at least that's the trend with a lot of my games I have that came before it).
@@Gadzooki I hadn't heard that either, but it is absolutely true that it pushes the limits of what an NES cartridge can do. Because of the fact it uses an 8 bit CPU that can only address 64 kilobytes total, combined with an entirely seperate bus for video ROM, as well as a few other choices, slightly over 41 kilobytes of storage space is the ABSOLUTE upper limit of a cartridge unless you build special circuits to play tricks with memory. (otherwise known as memory mappers.) This sounds like a relatively low limit, but keep in mind most of the 8 bit microcomputers had 64k of RAM, and frequently loaded from tape, which meant that in practice this was almost a hard limit on how large a program could be. Combine this with a different way of handling graphics and sound and typically you lost quite a lot of space to things you wouldn't have to worry about on a console, so the upper limits of complexity there too are pretty similar. Meanwhile, some of these systems also had cartridges, but say, an atari 800XL can only store 16k on a cartridge before running into the same problem the NES hits at 40k. And the 2600 hits that limit at just 4k.... All of which is a critical factor in the progression of game complexity and detail that is often overlooked, especially for cartridge based systems. While better hardware capabilities mattered a lot, on some level a major factor in SNES games being so much more impressive than NES ones is not the graphics hardware, but the storage space. Mario is 40k. The first SNES games were 1 megabyte. (the last few NES games, such as kirby, hit 768 kilobytes, roughly. And start to look awfully like SNES games but with less colour) SNES games quickly went to 2-4 megabytes, and some of them hit 6... While the 2d to 3d transition makes comparisons almost meaningless, the n64 started life with 8 megabytes. Of course, it's major competitors were using CD's with a minimum 540 megabyte capacity. (but there you hit a different limit on complexity; A CD is so slow that, as with tape before it, the effective complexity is limited by the amount of RAM. Though a CD is still fast enough to justify loading multiple independent game sections in small chunks. But the size of an area is limited by RAM, while a cartridge based 3d system wasn't completely free of this restriction, it was a lot less acute, and seamlessly loading in new data without anyone noticing was much less difficult - a fact borne out by mario 64 having loading boundaries located right out in the open cutting straight through the middle of many stages. Something that would have been intolerable if the system was loading from CD...) It's crazy to think how much influence storage space has actually had on games, since cartridges especially do a great job of disguising the improvements in capacity... But Super Mario is still a masterpiece in pushing limited storage space to it's utmost limits...
This video reminded me for a brief moment what it was like to experience this game, and ones of its era for the first time. It's something that no one will ever experience again ... not exactly anyway ... and that's kinda bittersweet. Don't be sad that it's over, be happy that it happened ... or something to that effect.
To be a kid when this came out was a very special thing. This game will forever be the perfect representation of our generations childhood. Like Star Wars and The Beatle's before it was more special and defining if you were young.
Super Mario Bros is the only game that still feels fresh to me after all these years (and countless playthroughs). I still remember how it felt back in the day with the discoveries and mistakes I made along the way. It’s never gotten stale or old. Yes, it’s truly one of the all-time greats!
I remember your very long, possibly 10 part level by level analysis of this on your old website. It was perhaps the most brilliant examination of the single most examined game of all time.
Great work Jeremy! One of my earliest memories (I was born in 84, so this was likely 87?) was of the opening screen of this game. Dad brought a NES for his friend in Canada (guess the release dates were different there), set it up to make sure it worked and let me watch and play a few minutes with it. My life from that moment forward was video games - we got our own NES about four weeks later, likely when my parents tired of me asking every moment of every day when I get to play Mario again.
Pretty much every time I fire this game up, I play all the way through without warps, then play the second quest with no warps, then the second quest again with warps. I've all but mastered it, but its just video games equivalent of comfort food.
The fact that you can put a 10 year old in front of this game these days, and they'll gladly play it really shows how well made this game actually was. How many other games from the 80's hold up this well? Donkey Kong, Wizardry, Final Fantasy, King's Quest, all classics, and they're very important games, but not really all that enjoyable for someone who does not have a lot of nostalgia for them.
Good point AFnord. I got my Sister a refurbished NES for her birthday a couple years ago. She plays several games for the nostalgiafun whereas her 7 year old son plays SMB because it's just fun and he doesn't care about the other cartridges.
@@batmandalorian5504 I bought the NES classic and SNES classic to save space, all those games and consoles take a lot of space, when my friends come over with their kids, the children always ask to play Super Mario Brothers.
I can understand why, though nothing in the original compares to Mario 2 / the lost levels. I skipped parts of world 7 in that game entirely unintentionally simply because I couldn't figure out where the proper, normal exits were. The lost levels really ramps up the maze aspect of some of the stages to an almost annoying level. The challenging jumps can be frustrating at times, but pale in comparison to those mazes...
I dont really see it being that hard. I understand that with the GBC version, I had the advantage of sound feedback, but still, how is it that hard without them?
It's not super hard. But keep in mind SMB had no continues whatsoever and most people would be short on lives by then, and the stage doesn't actually give the player any clue that the stage is even a maze.
@@aocplusme5676 lost levels was great. And honestly it's not that hard. The later worlds of Super Mario Bros 3 are quite a bit harder than anything in Lost Levels. The maze levels are only hard the first couple of times you play the game and then you have them memorized.
I appreciated your request for people to give the game a go with a clear and unprejudiced mind, that's precisely the perspective I try to achieve whenever playing older games for study and enjoyment.
It's an asinine statement, considering that freedom in the US is an empty promise to the masses. Only the elite 1% are privileged with true freedom; Most everyone else only lives with the illusion of freedom, and minorities don't even have that.
Having just beaten SMB 1 on my new Game & Watch, I felt it was really fitting to revisit this classic video. I don't know what it is, but from a game design perspective, something about the original Super Mario Bros. absolutely reeks of perfection. Sure, it's shown its age today, but everything from the level structure to enemy design is just so satisfying to learn about.
Hands down, your easily my favorite classic gaming console/classic gaming archivist/historian. Please keep up the fantastic curation of such timeless means of imaginative exploration of titles and consoles that are so much linked to my childhood. As original NES games were something that both my Dad and myself cherished beginning in the mid/late 1980’s.
I liked all the great Nintendo NES games from this era (1985-1995). Super Mario Bros., the music, the graphics, was way ahead of its time. This game, and its sequels, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3, was right up there with along with a library of other NES games like Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet, 10-Yard Fight, Excitebike, Golf, Kung Fu, Pinball, Ice Climber, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Donkey Kong 3, Donkey Kong Classics, Popeye, Mario Bros., Balloon Fight, Tag Team Wrestling, Karate Champ, Commando, 1942, 1943: The Battle of Midway, Ghosts 'N' Goblins, Gradius, Pro Wrestling, Slalom, the Castlevania games (Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and Castlevania III: Dracula's Quest), Burgertime, Solomon's Key, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Tiger-Heli, Star Voyager, Double Dribble, Spy Hunter, Super Spy Hunter, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Punch-Out!!, Rad Racer, Rad Racer II, Jaws, Kid Niki, Side Pocket, The Goonies II, the Mega Man games (Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man 3, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 6), the Contra games (Contra, Super C and Contra Force), R.C. Pro-Am, R.C. Pro-Am II, City Connection, the Bases Loaded games (Bases Loaded, Bases Loaded II, Bases Loaded 3, and Bases Loaded 4), the Double Dragon games (Double Dragon, Double Dragon II and Double Dragon III), R.B.I. Baseball, Galaga, the Wheel of Fortune games (Wheel of Fortune, Junior Edition, Family Edition, and Wheel of Fortune Featuring Vanna White), the Jeopardy! games (Jeopardy!, Jeopardy Junior Edition, and Jeopardy!: 25th Anniversary), Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, the Adventure Island games (Adventure Island, Adventure Island II and Adventure Island 3), Milon's Secret Castle, Life Force, Mickey Mousecapade, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, Blades of Steel, Bubble Bobble, Bubble Bubble Part 2, Blaster Master, Platoon, Bionic Commando, Anticipation, Paperboy, Paperboy 2, Rampage, Skate or Die, Ski or Die, Tecmo Baseball, Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Super Bowl, Friday the 13th, Bandai Golf Challenge: Pebble Beach, Q*bert, Marble Madness, the Ninja Gaiden games (Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, and Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom), RoboWarrrior, Sesame Street 1-2-3, Operation Wolf, the TMNT games (TMNT, TMNT II: The Arcade Game, TMNT III: The Manhattan Project, and TMNT: Tournament Fighters), Cobra Triangle, Hoops, Strider, the Dragon Warrior games (Dragon Warrior, Dragon Warrior II, Dragon Warrior III and Dragon Warrior IV), Baseball Stars, Monster Party, NFL, Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II & III, DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Goal!, Goal! Two, Tetris, Tetris 2, Willow, A Boy and His Blob, the RoboCop games (RoboCop, RoboCop 2, and RoboCop 3), Silent Service, River City Ransom, Road Blasters, the Batman games (Batman: The Video Game, Batman: Return of the Joker, and Batman Returns), Double Dare, Pin Bot, Captain Skyhawk, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll, Final Fantasy, Faxandu, Crystalis, Mechanized Attack, Barker Bill's Trick Shooting, NARC, Mission: Impossible, Spot: The Video Game!, Maniac Mansion, Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight, NES Play Action Football, RollerGames, D℞. Mario, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Super Spike V'Ball, Nintendo World Cup, YO! Noid, StarTropics, Arch Rivals, Digger T. Rock: The Legend of the Lost City, Shadow of the Ninja, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Qix, The Untouchables, Fox's Peter Pan & Pirates, The Hunt for Red October, Metal Storm, Power Blade, Totally Rad, Whomp 'Em, The Simpsons games (Bart vs. The Space Mutants, Bart vs. The World, Bartman Meets Radioactive Man), Videomation, Battletoads, Battletoads/Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team, Smash T.V., Captain Planet and the Planeteers, NES Open Tournament Golf, Trog!, Pirates!, the Home Alone games (Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), V.I.C.E.: Project Doom, Barbie, Tom and Jerry, Shatterhand, Captain America and the Avengers, the Tiny Toon Adventures games, The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, The Addams Family, Cyberball, Rampart, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Kickmaster, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Ghoul School, Toxic Crusaders, Hook, Wacky Races, Yoshi, Yoshi's Cookie, Darkwing Duck, The Blue Marlin, Defenders of Dynatron City, The Jetsons: Coswell's Caper, Felix the Cat, Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, Little Samson, Widget, Lemmings, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, Swamp Thing, George Foreman's KO Boxing, Joe & Mac, Rollerblade Racer, Kirby's Adventure, Jurassic Park, Mighty Final Fight, The Incredible Crash Dummies, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mario is Missing!, Wayne's World, Bonk's Adventure, The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$!, Alfred Chicken, Mario's Time Machine, The Jungle Book, Wario's Woods, etc. as well as the Zapper Light Gun games Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman, Gumshoe, To the Earth, and Barker Bill's Trick Shooting, the R.O.B. Series games Gyromite and Stack-Up, the Power Pad games Athletic World, World Class Track Meet, Super Team Games, Dance Aerobics, Street Cop and Short Order/Eggsplode!, and the Power Glove games Bad Street Brawler and Super Glove Ball. I have so many memories of playing this game on the Nintendo Entertainiment System. Super Mario Bros. is the many famous Nintendo video games and the bestselling video games of the 80's, 90's, 2000's, 2010's, and 2020's brought to you by Kojo Kondo. The game is still revelant today.
Glad this video explains the main thing that was so revolutionary about this game: The physics of controlling the main character. It's interesting to note that another Mario game, Super Mario 64, revolutionzed video game controls again, by making the inputs relative to the camera viewpoint instead of relative to the character viewpoint. So almost every 2D platformer and third person 3D game today uses Mario controls.
Another terrific video! I recently went through this game on Virtual Console for the first time since the early 90's and it really and truly does hold up masterfully.
I remember the very first time I played Mario with my brother. We thought the game had glitched because Mario became green and wouldn't move. It was Luigi waiting for input from the second controller
Such great in-depth research and delivery. Awesome work, Jeremy! Also, the screen capture is so beautiful. The episode of Retronauts on video output now makes so much sense :)
I don't remember the last time I've played through every SMB level sequentially (if ever), but this really makes me want to. I think that would be a pretty fun challenge. This was another great episode in your series, I always look forward to watching your videos!
Loved the talk on the jump mechanics of the game. Pre-SMB the closest jumping controls to SMB I would say I've played is Sega's Flicky (1984). It has a lot of momentum & changing direction in mid air is smooth.
11:53 - I watched my dad do this when I was a kid only once, and I've tried and tried to replicate that and haven't seen it again until this video. That was almost 30 years ago. I'll never forget it.
I like to rewatch this video every few months. Super Mario Bros was the first video game I ever played, and even though it wasn't until 1989 or so, I deeply appreciate how much effort you put into placing this game in the context of its release and outlining just how revolutionary and influential it was. I really think a lot of that is being lost to history, or people kind of know but don't *really* know. Anyway, I was kind of in the dumps today and coming back here helped
19:48 "When was the last time you played through World 7?" Last month, actually. On my first ever-playthrough of SMB Deluxe. What a great port. And what a great video Jeremy. I've been looking forward to this one since you launched this project, and it didn't dissapoint. Kudos.
luisguillermojg My answer to that question is "All the time," because nowadays, every time I play this game, I pride myself on warpless (semi-)speedruns.
I think that port would have been maddening if I owned if back in the day because of the insane amount of screen crunch but these days I know the game well enough that I know what is beyond all those blind jumps
What a great video, Jeremy. Good Nintentions in general is always a joy to watch (or listen to while doing things). It's sad that it ends wth SMB, but at least the last video surely feels like a proper ending.
Oh, sorry if it sounded that way. I should have explained myself better... When i said "ends" I meant this "stairway to heaven" like year, in which each game feels like a step forward to something bigger that affected the entire industry for the better, and you reflected upon to make this first part of Good Nintentions so interesting. Of course, NES games evolded after SMB quite a bit, and there's a lot you can talk about; but I don't know if I can say that the mark that SMB left was surpassed in it's importance, even if later games would improve in many areas.
I'm not knocking SMBs incredible fluid motion but I often consider the brittleness of the earlier games, intentional or not, is part of their charm. A game like Ice Climber if it had Mario like movement likely wouldn't last very long. Its easy to forget these games were expensive and you wanted a game that took perhaps months to truly master. Watch any pro playing one of these older games and you can see what I mean, the controls might be hard - but they CAN be mastered, and mastering them is a very enjoyable reward for the hard work involved.
The original Mario Bros. is a really good game as well. Mario Bros. established the profession of plumber for Mario, which seems to be something Nintendo has forgotten, or just dropped altogether, in their recent Super Mario Bros. game iterations.
Well he passed through a huge number of careers before that, mostly to legitimize his being there in all those construction sites and circuses, then became a plumber for these few games to establish the presence of pipes. Since then he's rarely in a game that doesn't feature the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, so it can be assumed he left a life of honest work and basically leeches of the Royal family in exchange for rescuing them every few years.
Wonderful analysis of the game. Great to remember how mind blowing it was the first time I saw a vine, or ran on top of a level. But it’s a bit odd to see this detailed an analysis of the game without hearing the words Kōji Kondō.
This game is a master piece. I finished it for the first time last night. It really isn’t too hard once you memorize the last couple levels and get yourself familiar with how to navigate the hammer brothers and bowser.
It's genuinely surprising how challenging this game remains today. I've completed it four or five times since it's Wii U release, but i've had nearly 3 times as many failed attempts (I refuse to use save states).
Real gamers do whatever they want, whatever gives them enjoyment People have jobs and kids and responsibilities. Unless you're a child with none of those things and have a bunch of spare time, there's not gonna be dozens of hours available to dedicate to learning and beating a game the "proper" way. If you only have a handful of hours per week to actually play games, who actually gives a fuck how people play them? So what if they use save states? Don't be a gatekeeping asshole. Video games are toys to play with and have fun. That's it. People play them however they want to give them a fun time. That's all that matters.
Didn't the number of fireworks have to do with the last digit of your score when you hit the flag? If it was a 3 you got 3 fireworks, if it was a 6 you got 6? I'm not sure about this but when he mentioned it it jogged a memory in my 44 year old brain.
An interesting thing I found in reading some of the first Nintendo Powers is that they covered many of the unintended glitches, such as Minus World and wall-jumping, similarly to how they discussed intended secrets such as the fireworks.
My understanding is that they regularly shared glitches as tricks... right up until the point where they published a Pokémon Gen 1 exploit that had a tendency to erase save files and got a ton of complaints.
I just discovered your channel. SNES : NES Your Content : Pat's Video Game Years I mean that as high praise. Your videos are research librarian x excellent graphic design x great narration x passion. Thank you for sharing. Subscribed and will binge on your vids for the foreseeable future. You by merit should have more subscribers- I hope others continue to find your stuff, it's fantastic.
As you noted in the vid, SMB1 did get a FDS port of its own, which came out a few months before the notoriously difficult (and, sometimes, incredibly weird) SMB2 for FDS. I'm sure other people have pointed this out in other places, but at least by the time they ported SMB1 to FDS, they must have been familiar with the "minus world" glitch, as many of the oddities that show up specifically when the glitch is performed on the FDS port appear to have influenced the particularly surreal world 9 of SMB, such as the bowser floating in the ocean that you show at 12:40
A minor note: I do remember there was an interview with one of the programmers who claimed they did know about the infinite lives trick before the game's release. I couldn't find a link.
Great series Jeremy! Would it be at all possible to include the console the game was released on in the banner showing the developer, year etc? It might be a little redundant but I find myself googling to see where Pac-Land first came out for example, just to give context to what I'm seeing.
Your bit on SMB's controls was a bit overstated. Sega had already produced Flicky a year before SMB's release, which included similar momentum-based movement and controllable jumps in a scrolling platform game (although the jump's height wasn't controllable in Flicky, merely its horizontal direction; SMB may have been the first game to allow jump height to be controlled via button press duration, but it's difficult to research this sort of thing due to people's tendency to assign any innovation that doesn't have an obvious, well-known precedent to Nintendo.) Super Mario Brothers' chief quality was that it was able to take ideas like this, which were previously arcade-exclusive, and present them on a home console. The Famicom/NES was the most advanced home console available at the time (the Sega Master System wouldn't debut until a couple of months after SMB's release) and Nintendo benefited greatly from that. You could say that Nintendo's entire legacy and enduring relevance was based on the fact that they based their first swappable-game console on the most advanced technology available at the time, a lesson that they have completely and utterly forgotten in the years since.
I don't really agree. Because as you said, even back then arcades had better hardware than home consoles. The power of the NES was valuable because that's what they needed to make good games, or else it would be another Atari. The arcades had increasingly impressive technology and graphics, while the home NES and later SNES were far more successful. This is simply due to the types of games being made. Like the video stated, focusing on bigger, longer lasting games was what Nintendo was betting on. Games like Zelda and Metroid, where you needed to save your game, and went on an adventure in a large mazelike world. It was a much more unique experience full of progression and potential than any fast and quick arcade game could offer.
I think it's rather misleading to suggest the NES was based on advanced technology, even for it's era. It certainly wasn't the weakest, but it was surrounded by consoles and home computers with capabilities in the same ballpark. And let's not forget that the Amiga, while heavily limited in availability early on, first saw the light of day in 1985. Meanwhile, the BBC Micro, C64, and 64k revisions of the Atari 8 bit home computers are not an exact match for the NES in terms of capabilities, but they're all within broadly the same ballpark. (as demonstrated pretty well by more than a few homebrew titles in recent years) Arcades vastly outclassed the NES, home microcomputers were already on the verge of being 16 bit systems (or more, in case of PC, though the pricetag was unimpressive.) No, in context, the NES is decidedly mediocre. Neither amazingly capable, nor amazingly weak. In fact, if you're going to argue about bleeding edge hardware and Nintendo, the n64 and gamecube are far closer to this. The n64 had the most powerful 3d capabilities of any console in that period, and even very briefly arguably outgunned the majority of PC's. (which is an otherwise unheard of situation) Some 3 times more powerful than it's competitors, but hamstrung by some notable design flaws, and the fact that it was pushing graphical effects that took something like 7-8x the processing effort of the competition, on a system that was really only about 3 times as powerful, and since those effects were not THAT dramatically impressive, this had the unfortunate effect of making the system appear slow and lacking in detail. Which is because it was underpowered for what it was doing, even if highly overpowered compared to what it was competing with. The NES by contrast is mediocre from the start, and in context of what came later in the same generation, even less impressive. Nintendo haven't forgotten, in fact, they remembered exactly what the NES was better than you seem to. They also remember the perpetually worse and worse (n64 and gamecube) results they were getting from actually trying to push bleeding edge hardware, and realised they had to try something else. which they did. And which so far, has had a better outcome for 2 of 3 attempts.
11:47 I don't know if this is true for the version of SMB you played, but on the version that's packed together with Duck Hunt at least, your lives do not loop to 0. Instead, the life counter maxes out somewhere around 100 or so lives.
...Well dang. I decided to test it out for myself, and sure enough, if you grind too many lives, it resets to 0. In fact, once you hit 0, it's stuck there even if you try to grind more. What's amazing is I've never actually had that happen before, and I used the trick a lot. In fact, there were times that I'd let the time run out so that I could get a go at even more lives. And yet somehow, I always stopped before my lives looped to 0.
I was really hoping you'd go at least to Legend of Zelda with this series, if not Metroid or even Final Fantasy. Also, you barely mentioned the music, and I wanted to hear more about the dev team and creation process of SMB. All that said, this is still a fantastic video, and thank you for all the great work you've done to preserve the history of the medium. I hope these videos will last for future generations of game historians to learn from!
I recently played through Alex Kidd in Miracle World (the first time that I'd touched it since the 1980's) and couldn't help but feel that a lot of the deaths felt cheap since the jumping was just a little too floaty. Once you've experienced the jumping mechanics of Mario games, it really is hard to play any platformer that doesn't do them as well.
I'd actually treat at reusing stages as weakness. They should be used in master quest instead. Although aspect you overlooked in Mario's physics is block nudging. Normally, trying to jump onto a higher platform could be frustrating but when Mario has enough offset from the block above, he is nudged in a way that will make it much easier to get to the higher platform.
randallross420 even though she was introduced to me as Princess Toadstool back when I was 5, I still prefer Peach, as it is a more simple name (Which is more than I can say for Robotnik vs. Eggman)
Sir Osis of Thuliver Toadstool is just her Western name, the same way Dr. Eggman became Dr. Robotnik for the localized version. She was always Princess Peach in Japan. Super Mario 64 tried to make them one in the same by including both during that letter in the intro “Sincerely, Princess Toadstool - Peach” After that one game, however, they pretty much dropped Toadstool altogether.
The NES was only available first in NYC/NJ Markets for its first 3 Weeks. It DID reach other Markets in the US by November 1,1985 making its West Coast Debut that day. It was WIDELY available by Christmas in Most US Markets and Retailers.
Man, this video should have a spoiler warning on it! I kid, I kid. Love that wrap sentence: SMB was designed to make the most of the NES innate power, but the NES benefited far more from the power of super mario brothers.
No time soon, sorry. I am heavily revamping Anatomy of Castlevania to make the text more expansive and more cogent. Maybe I’ll follow up with Mario someday.
DiC Animation City produced The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (1989) in conjunction with Nintendo of America, The Walt Disney Company and Viacom International
Oh I just made this connection, since I watched a bunch of videos on Mario and Metriodvanias back to back: The repeating levels seem out of place since the game is linear, and it doesn't show in the gameplay, but plot-wise, it could be considered the equivalent of backtracking a la Metroid, or at the very least similar to repeating a Mario 64 level for a different goal.
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"There are a very few moments in video game history you can point to and say, 'this is where everything changed.' Super Mario Brothers is one of them. 8/10"
The secret to finding the correct path in the final Bowser Castle is to always take the first pipe after the lava in each section.
Exactly.
Very noticable pattern once you find the solution.
Back in the day Super Mario Bros was truly "it." Beating it was a badge of honor at school. I think I've only beaten it one time in my life.
The entire game feels tough but fair then world 8 moves in for the kill.
@@Grandtank1999 We all joke "Oh haha, Mario's a game for kids," but no, this game goes hard. It is a right bastard, and clearing it without the use of warp zones is a badge of honor in my book.
@@lilwyvern4The fact I’ve made it tradition to do that once a year says I either have way too much spare time, or I’ve gotten really good at Mario. Both? Both probably
I remember palying ice climber as a kid and asking "Why didn't they just make the jumping like mario?" Hindsight is so 20/20
I was a kid when we arrived at Liverpool (a chain store) in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. That day left an everlasting impression in me, as there was this big TV and a little crowd of kids and some adults around it. My dad and I took a peek and my world changed forever: there it was, in a time of single-screen arcades and simple Atari graphics, a game so full of colors, music and scrolling. Mario, jumping, running and growing, breaking blocks, going thru large worlds with wild scenery. It looked like nothing I seen before and that emotion, that sense of discovery, that everything had changed forever I've never felt again in my life with the same amazement, as only kids can feel. Thus is the significance of Super Mario Bros. in my life.
The context of Super Mario Bros. as the ultimate cartridge game is fascinating. Puts some things into perspective.
Thanks for the awesome video as always!
I agree, never heard of it referenced in such a way, but that is a really fascinating observation!
@@Gadzooki Considering some of the games that came before and it was kinda true. Most were basically arcade games, and didn't give much adventure(and the ones that did were basically arcade games with the theory to kill you every 2 minutes still there or as he mentioned in the vid terrible controls at least that's the trend with a lot of my games I have that came before it).
@@Gadzooki I hadn't heard that either, but it is absolutely true that it pushes the limits of what an NES cartridge can do.
Because of the fact it uses an 8 bit CPU that can only address 64 kilobytes total, combined with an entirely seperate bus for video ROM, as well as a few other choices, slightly over 41 kilobytes of storage space is the ABSOLUTE upper limit of a cartridge unless you build special circuits to play tricks with memory. (otherwise known as memory mappers.)
This sounds like a relatively low limit, but keep in mind most of the 8 bit microcomputers had 64k of RAM, and frequently loaded from tape, which meant that in practice this was almost a hard limit on how large a program could be.
Combine this with a different way of handling graphics and sound and typically you lost quite a lot of space to things you wouldn't have to worry about on a console, so the upper limits of complexity there too are pretty similar.
Meanwhile, some of these systems also had cartridges, but say, an atari 800XL can only store 16k on a cartridge before running into the same problem the NES hits at 40k.
And the 2600 hits that limit at just 4k....
All of which is a critical factor in the progression of game complexity and detail that is often overlooked, especially for cartridge based systems.
While better hardware capabilities mattered a lot, on some level a major factor in SNES games being so much more impressive than NES ones is not the graphics hardware, but the storage space.
Mario is 40k.
The first SNES games were 1 megabyte.
(the last few NES games, such as kirby, hit 768 kilobytes, roughly. And start to look awfully like SNES games but with less colour)
SNES games quickly went to 2-4 megabytes, and some of them hit 6...
While the 2d to 3d transition makes comparisons almost meaningless, the n64 started life with 8 megabytes.
Of course, it's major competitors were using CD's with a minimum 540 megabyte capacity.
(but there you hit a different limit on complexity; A CD is so slow that, as with tape before it, the effective complexity is limited by the amount of RAM. Though a CD is still fast enough to justify loading multiple independent game sections in small chunks. But the size of an area is limited by RAM, while a cartridge based 3d system wasn't completely free of this restriction, it was a lot less acute, and seamlessly loading in new data without anyone noticing was much less difficult - a fact borne out by mario 64 having loading boundaries located right out in the open cutting straight through the middle of many stages. Something that would have been intolerable if the system was loading from CD...)
It's crazy to think how much influence storage space has actually had on games, since cartridges especially do a great job of disguising the improvements in capacity...
But Super Mario is still a masterpiece in pushing limited storage space to it's utmost limits...
This video reminded me for a brief moment what it was like to experience this game, and ones of its era for the first time. It's something that no one will ever experience again ... not exactly anyway ... and that's kinda bittersweet.
Don't be sad that it's over, be happy that it happened ... or something to that effect.
Thank you, that's a fantastic compliment.
To be a kid when this came out was a very special thing. This game will forever be the perfect representation of our generations childhood. Like Star Wars and The Beatle's before it was more special and defining if you were young.
@Wenceslao Futanaki yep. We had the 2600 too. I loved Dodge em'. My grandpa gave me the E. T. game for Christmas, God it was awful
Still love this retrospective. I remember playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time on Christmas morning 1987. Pure magic.
born in 81 and i feel this video in my heart and soul
Super Mario Bros is the only game that still feels fresh to me after all these years (and countless playthroughs). I still remember how it felt back in the day with the discoveries and mistakes I made along the way. It’s never gotten stale or old. Yes, it’s truly one of the all-time greats!
I remember your very long, possibly 10 part level by level analysis of this on your old website. It was perhaps the most brilliant examination of the single most examined game of all time.
Thanks! I've toyed with the idea of turning those articles into a video series.
@@JeremyParish I really wanna see that analysis!
Yeah, where can this analysis be found?
To this day, there is a competitive speed run scene dedicated to beating the game as fast as humanly possible. What an amazing video game.
Great work Jeremy! One of my earliest memories (I was born in 84, so this was likely 87?) was of the opening screen of this game. Dad brought a NES for his friend in Canada (guess the release dates were different there), set it up to make sure it worked and let me watch and play a few minutes with it. My life from that moment forward was video games - we got our own NES about four weeks later, likely when my parents tired of me asking every moment of every day when I get to play Mario again.
Pretty much every time I fire this game up, I play all the way through without warps, then play the second quest with no warps, then the second quest again with warps. I've all but mastered it, but its just video games equivalent of comfort food.
The fact that you can put a 10 year old in front of this game these days, and they'll gladly play it really shows how well made this game actually was. How many other games from the 80's hold up this well? Donkey Kong, Wizardry, Final Fantasy, King's Quest, all classics, and they're very important games, but not really all that enjoyable for someone who does not have a lot of nostalgia for them.
Good point AFnord. I got my Sister a refurbished NES for her birthday a couple years ago. She plays several games for the nostalgiafun whereas her 7 year old son plays SMB because it's just fun and he doesn't care about the other cartridges.
@@batmandalorian5504 I bought the NES classic and SNES classic to save space, all those games and consoles take a lot of space, when my friends come over with their kids, the children always ask to play Super Mario Brothers.
I'll admit, when I first got to world 7-4, i was stumped! I had to look up the solution in Nintendo Power.
I can understand why, though nothing in the original compares to Mario 2 / the lost levels.
I skipped parts of world 7 in that game entirely unintentionally simply because I couldn't figure out where the proper, normal exits were.
The lost levels really ramps up the maze aspect of some of the stages to an almost annoying level.
The challenging jumps can be frustrating at times, but pale in comparison to those mazes...
I dont really see it being that hard.
I understand that with the GBC version, I had the advantage of sound feedback, but still, how is it that hard without them?
It's not super hard. But keep in mind SMB had no continues whatsoever and most people would be short on lives by then, and the stage doesn't actually give the player any clue that the stage is even a maze.
@@aocplusme5676 lost levels was great. And honestly it's not that hard. The later worlds of Super Mario Bros 3 are quite a bit harder than anything in Lost Levels. The maze levels are only hard the first couple of times you play the game and then you have them memorized.
I appreciated your request for people to give the game a go with a clear and unprejudiced mind, that's precisely the perspective I try to achieve whenever playing older games for study and enjoyment.
"Mario was like G.I. Joe: fighting for freedom wherever there's trouble over land and sea and air."
- Jeremy Parish
It's an asinine statement, considering that freedom in the US is an empty promise to the masses.
Only the elite 1% are privileged with true freedom; Most everyone else only lives with the illusion of freedom, and minorities don't even have that.
@@JanetStarChild m8, this is a mario video, we can have topics like that some other time
What a great tribute to Super Mario Bros. Thank you, Jeremy.
Having just beaten SMB 1 on my new Game & Watch, I felt it was really fitting to revisit this classic video. I don't know what it is, but from a game design perspective, something about the original Super Mario Bros. absolutely reeks of perfection. Sure, it's shown its age today, but everything from the level structure to enemy design is just so satisfying to learn about.
Hands down, your easily my favorite classic gaming console/classic gaming archivist/historian. Please keep up the fantastic curation of such timeless means of imaginative exploration of titles and consoles that are so much linked to my childhood. As original NES games were something that both my Dad and myself cherished beginning in the mid/late 1980’s.
Just got done watching all of your videos (minus the raw game footage). Incredible work! Thank you!
I liked all the great Nintendo NES games from this era (1985-1995). Super Mario Bros., the music, the graphics, was way ahead of its time. This game, and its sequels, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3, was right up there with along with a library of other NES games like Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet, 10-Yard Fight, Excitebike, Golf, Kung Fu, Pinball, Ice Climber, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Donkey Kong 3, Donkey Kong Classics, Popeye, Mario Bros., Balloon Fight, Tag Team Wrestling, Karate Champ, Commando, 1942, 1943: The Battle of Midway, Ghosts 'N' Goblins, Gradius, Pro Wrestling, Slalom, the Castlevania games (Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and Castlevania III: Dracula's Quest), Burgertime, Solomon's Key, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Tiger-Heli, Star Voyager, Double Dribble, Spy Hunter, Super Spy Hunter, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Punch-Out!!, Rad Racer, Rad Racer II, Jaws, Kid Niki, Side Pocket, The Goonies II, the Mega Man games (Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man 3, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 6), the Contra games (Contra, Super C and Contra Force), R.C. Pro-Am, R.C. Pro-Am II, City Connection, the Bases Loaded games (Bases Loaded, Bases Loaded II, Bases Loaded 3, and Bases Loaded 4), the Double Dragon games (Double Dragon, Double Dragon II and Double Dragon III), R.B.I. Baseball, Galaga, the Wheel of Fortune games (Wheel of Fortune, Junior Edition, Family Edition, and Wheel of Fortune Featuring Vanna White), the Jeopardy! games (Jeopardy!, Jeopardy Junior Edition, and Jeopardy!: 25th Anniversary), Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, the Adventure Island games (Adventure Island, Adventure Island II and Adventure Island 3), Milon's Secret Castle, Life Force, Mickey Mousecapade, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, Blades of Steel, Bubble Bobble, Bubble Bubble Part 2, Blaster Master, Platoon, Bionic Commando, Anticipation, Paperboy, Paperboy 2, Rampage, Skate or Die, Ski or Die, Tecmo Baseball, Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Super Bowl, Friday the 13th, Bandai Golf Challenge: Pebble Beach, Q*bert, Marble Madness, the Ninja Gaiden games (Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, and Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom), RoboWarrrior, Sesame Street 1-2-3, Operation Wolf, the TMNT games (TMNT, TMNT II: The Arcade Game, TMNT III: The Manhattan Project, and TMNT: Tournament Fighters), Cobra Triangle, Hoops, Strider, the Dragon Warrior games (Dragon Warrior, Dragon Warrior II, Dragon Warrior III and Dragon Warrior IV), Baseball Stars, Monster Party, NFL, Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II & III, DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Goal!, Goal! Two, Tetris, Tetris 2, Willow, A Boy and His Blob, the RoboCop games (RoboCop, RoboCop 2, and RoboCop 3), Silent Service, River City Ransom, Road Blasters, the Batman games (Batman: The Video Game, Batman: Return of the Joker, and Batman Returns), Double Dare, Pin Bot, Captain Skyhawk, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll, Final Fantasy, Faxandu, Crystalis, Mechanized Attack, Barker Bill's Trick Shooting, NARC, Mission: Impossible, Spot: The Video Game!, Maniac Mansion, Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight, NES Play Action Football, RollerGames, D℞. Mario, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Super Spike V'Ball, Nintendo World Cup, YO! Noid, StarTropics, Arch Rivals, Digger T. Rock: The Legend of the Lost City, Shadow of the Ninja, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Qix, The Untouchables, Fox's Peter Pan & Pirates, The Hunt for Red October, Metal Storm, Power Blade, Totally Rad, Whomp 'Em, The Simpsons games (Bart vs. The Space Mutants, Bart vs. The World, Bartman Meets Radioactive Man), Videomation, Battletoads, Battletoads/Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team, Smash T.V., Captain Planet and the Planeteers, NES Open Tournament Golf, Trog!, Pirates!, the Home Alone games (Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), V.I.C.E.: Project Doom, Barbie, Tom and Jerry, Shatterhand, Captain America and the Avengers, the Tiny Toon Adventures games, The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, The Addams Family, Cyberball, Rampart, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Kickmaster, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Ghoul School, Toxic Crusaders, Hook, Wacky Races, Yoshi, Yoshi's Cookie, Darkwing Duck, The Blue Marlin, Defenders of Dynatron City, The Jetsons: Coswell's Caper, Felix the Cat, Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, Little Samson, Widget, Lemmings, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, Swamp Thing, George Foreman's KO Boxing, Joe & Mac, Rollerblade Racer, Kirby's Adventure, Jurassic Park, Mighty Final Fight, The Incredible Crash Dummies, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mario is Missing!, Wayne's World, Bonk's Adventure, The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$!, Alfred Chicken, Mario's Time Machine, The Jungle Book, Wario's Woods, etc. as well as the Zapper Light Gun games Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman, Gumshoe, To the Earth, and Barker Bill's Trick Shooting, the R.O.B. Series games Gyromite and Stack-Up, the Power Pad games Athletic World, World Class Track Meet, Super Team Games, Dance Aerobics, Street Cop and Short Order/Eggsplode!, and the Power Glove games Bad Street Brawler and Super Glove Ball.
I have so many memories of playing this game on the Nintendo Entertainiment System. Super Mario Bros. is the many famous Nintendo video games and the bestselling video games of the 80's, 90's, 2000's, 2010's, and 2020's brought to you by Kojo Kondo. The game is still revelant today.
Glad this video explains the main thing that was so revolutionary about this game: The physics of controlling the main character.
It's interesting to note that another Mario game, Super Mario 64, revolutionzed video game controls again, by making the inputs relative to the camera viewpoint instead of relative to the character viewpoint.
So almost every 2D platformer and third person 3D game today uses Mario controls.
Another terrific video! I recently went through this game on Virtual Console for the first time since the early 90's and it really and truly does hold up masterfully.
Hmm. Since it looks like the core of this game is an amalgamation of Nintendo's other games, I wonder if they took the turbo B button from Excitebike.
I remember the very first time I played Mario with my brother. We thought the game had glitched because Mario became green and wouldn't move. It was Luigi waiting for input from the second controller
Such great in-depth research and delivery. Awesome work, Jeremy! Also, the screen capture is so beautiful. The episode of Retronauts on video output now makes so much sense :)
Thank you for being passionate enough to make such interesting content. Keep up the good work!
But that will be for a later time (disk system)
4 years later. Great BTW. Your my favorite video game reviewer
I don't remember the last time I've played through every SMB level sequentially (if ever), but this really makes me want to. I think that would be a pretty fun challenge.
This was another great episode in your series, I always look forward to watching your videos!
Loved the talk on the jump mechanics of the game. Pre-SMB the closest jumping controls to SMB I would say I've played is Sega's Flicky (1984). It has a lot of momentum & changing direction in mid air is smooth.
Good Ninetentions was great. Thanks for all of them. Looking forward to the next mode 7 video.
I thought this was just the end of them for 1985
+sprdvx I hope I'm wrong. I enjoy these videos.
11:53 - I watched my dad do this when I was a kid only once, and I've tried and tried to replicate that and haven't seen it again until this video. That was almost 30 years ago. I'll never forget it.
I remember playing Mario 1 the Christmas it came out. It was mindblowingly amazing!
It still holds up.
I like to rewatch this video every few months. Super Mario Bros was the first video game I ever played, and even though it wasn't until 1989 or so, I deeply appreciate how much effort you put into placing this game in the context of its release and outlining just how revolutionary and influential it was. I really think a lot of that is being lost to history, or people kind of know but don't *really* know. Anyway, I was kind of in the dumps today and coming back here helped
19:48 "When was the last time you played through World 7?"
Last month, actually. On my first ever-playthrough of SMB Deluxe. What a great port. And what a great video Jeremy. I've been looking forward to this one since you launched this project, and it didn't dissapoint. Kudos.
luisguillermojg My answer to that question is "All the time," because nowadays, every time I play this game, I pride myself on warpless (semi-)speedruns.
I think that port would have been maddening if I owned if back in the day because of the insane amount of screen crunch but these days I know the game well enough that I know what is beyond all those blind jumps
This is the serious and comprehensive NES-centric series I've been wanting.
Exceptionally deep level history. A-plus🤩
Can't wait for 1986!
What a great video, Jeremy. Good Nintentions in general is always a joy to watch (or listen to while doing things). It's sad that it ends wth SMB, but at least the last video surely feels like a proper ending.
This is the end of Good Nintentions... 1985.
Oh, sorry if it sounded that way. I should have explained myself better...
When i said "ends" I meant this "stairway to heaven" like year, in which each game feels like a step forward to something bigger that affected the entire industry for the better, and you reflected upon to make this first part of Good Nintentions so interesting.
Of course, NES games evolded after SMB quite a bit, and there's a lot you can talk about; but I don't know if I can say that the mark that SMB left was surpassed in it's importance, even if later games would improve in many areas.
Played it on the NES, the SNES (Super Mario All-Stars), the GBC (SMB Deluxe) and the GBA (NES Classic Series)
The fireworks are based on your clear time. If the time ends in a xx6, xx3, or xx1 you get 6, 3, or 1 bursts.
I'm not knocking SMBs incredible fluid motion but I often consider the brittleness of the earlier games, intentional or not, is part of their charm. A game like Ice Climber if it had Mario like movement likely wouldn't last very long. Its easy to forget these games were expensive and you wanted a game that took perhaps months to truly master. Watch any pro playing one of these older games and you can see what I mean, the controls might be hard - but they CAN be mastered, and mastering them is a very enjoyable reward for the hard work involved.
The original Mario Bros. is a really good game as well. Mario Bros. established the profession of plumber for Mario, which seems to be something Nintendo has forgotten, or just dropped altogether, in their recent Super Mario Bros. game iterations.
Well he passed through a huge number of careers before that, mostly to legitimize his being there in all those construction sites and circuses, then became a plumber for these few games to establish the presence of pipes. Since then he's rarely in a game that doesn't feature the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, so it can be assumed he left a life of honest work and basically leeches of the Royal family in exchange for rescuing them every few years.
These videos deserve many, many more views.
Wonderful analysis of the game. Great to remember how mind blowing it was the first time I saw a vine, or ran on top of a level. But it’s a bit odd to see this detailed an analysis of the game without hearing the words Kōji Kondō.
Got chills at the end. God I love this game.
Great video and worthy treatment for such a masterpiece
This game is a master piece. I finished it for the first time last night. It really isn’t too hard once you memorize the last couple levels and get yourself familiar with how to navigate the hammer brothers and bowser.
Besides the uniqueness of it, SMB was universal like music or art.
Those half Sidesteppers at 6:52 were a pretty clever idea back in the day.
It's genuinely surprising how challenging this game remains today. I've completed it four or five times since it's Wii U release, but i've had nearly 3 times as many failed attempts (I refuse to use save states).
Good for you. SMB should always be played without save states.
@@Cyxodus I'm not sure that's necessarily true.
Real gamers never use save states
Real gamers do whatever they want, whatever gives them enjoyment
People have jobs and kids and responsibilities. Unless you're a child with none of those things and have a bunch of spare time, there's not gonna be dozens of hours available to dedicate to learning and beating a game the "proper" way.
If you only have a handful of hours per week to actually play games, who actually gives a fuck how people play them? So what if they use save states? Don't be a gatekeeping asshole. Video games are toys to play with and have fun. That's it. People play them however they want to give them a fun time. That's all that matters.
duffman18 hahaha ur just bad at the game ¡lol! 😂👉
Didn't the number of fireworks have to do with the last digit of your score when you hit the flag? If it was a 3 you got 3 fireworks, if it was a 6 you got 6? I'm not sure about this but when he mentioned it it jogged a memory in my 44 year old brain.
1 or 3 or 6
Absolutely love the Famicom Disk System
This is the first video game I remember. It was mesmerizing.
Excellent video! I learned a ton!
This is basically a Ted Talk on Super Mario bros.
Very cool
A wonderful essay.
Brilliant. Perfection IS forever.
So good! I've been waiting for this episode, and you totally delivered.
The first video game I ever played. 31 years later, still gaming.
Best thumb nail on TH-cam.
Another great entry!!
i just remembered link turns red when you use the shield magic in zelda 2!
An interesting thing I found in reading some of the first Nintendo Powers is that they covered many of the unintended glitches, such as Minus World and wall-jumping, similarly to how they discussed intended secrets such as the fireworks.
My understanding is that they regularly shared glitches as tricks... right up until the point where they published a Pokémon Gen 1 exploit that had a tendency to erase save files and got a ton of complaints.
And I thought yet another SMB video wouldn't be interesting. Great work.
I just discovered your channel.
SNES : NES
Your Content : Pat's Video Game Years
I mean that as high praise. Your videos are research librarian x excellent graphic design x great narration x passion.
Thank you for sharing. Subscribed and will binge on your vids for the foreseeable future. You by merit should have more subscribers- I hope others continue to find your stuff, it's fantastic.
I have a NES in my office ready to go with smb1 or smb2. They are both still extremely playable, and better designed than 99% of games out there.
My favorite game of all time.
This video was very well done. Excellent script.
My parents neighbor friends got three of them...sold us one. Rest was history.
So I've been marathoning the good nintentions series and I'm hooked to this channel. Keep up the good work.
As you noted in the vid, SMB1 did get a FDS port of its own, which came out a few months before the notoriously difficult (and, sometimes, incredibly weird) SMB2 for FDS. I'm sure other people have pointed this out in other places, but at least by the time they ported SMB1 to FDS, they must have been familiar with the "minus world" glitch, as many of the oddities that show up specifically when the glitch is performed on the FDS port appear to have influenced the particularly surreal world 9 of SMB, such as the bowser floating in the ocean that you show at 12:40
Well done Jeremy! sub'd and enjoy your videos very much
A minor note: I do remember there was an interview with one of the programmers who claimed they did know about the infinite lives trick before the game's release. I couldn't find a link.
Excellent analysis. I don't know that I've heard a more scholarly take on Mario's first "Super" outing.
Great series Jeremy! Would it be at all possible to include the console the game was released on in the banner showing the developer, year etc? It might be a little redundant but I find myself googling to see where Pac-Land first came out for example, just to give context to what I'm seeing.
Thanks for the time machine!
The most important video game ever made. Without this game, the home video game industry would have stayed dead.
Your bit on SMB's controls was a bit overstated. Sega had already produced Flicky a year before SMB's release, which included similar momentum-based movement and controllable jumps in a scrolling platform game (although the jump's height wasn't controllable in Flicky, merely its horizontal direction; SMB may have been the first game to allow jump height to be controlled via button press duration, but it's difficult to research this sort of thing due to people's tendency to assign any innovation that doesn't have an obvious, well-known precedent to Nintendo.)
Super Mario Brothers' chief quality was that it was able to take ideas like this, which were previously arcade-exclusive, and present them on a home console. The Famicom/NES was the most advanced home console available at the time (the Sega Master System wouldn't debut until a couple of months after SMB's release) and Nintendo benefited greatly from that. You could say that Nintendo's entire legacy and enduring relevance was based on the fact that they based their first swappable-game console on the most advanced technology available at the time, a lesson that they have completely and utterly forgotten in the years since.
I don't really agree. Because as you said, even back then arcades had better hardware than home consoles. The power of the NES was valuable because that's what they needed to make good games, or else it would be another Atari. The arcades had increasingly impressive technology and graphics, while the home NES and later SNES were far more successful. This is simply due to the types of games being made. Like the video stated, focusing on bigger, longer lasting games was what Nintendo was betting on. Games like Zelda and Metroid, where you needed to save your game, and went on an adventure in a large mazelike world. It was a much more unique experience full of progression and potential than any fast and quick arcade game could offer.
I think it's rather misleading to suggest the NES was based on advanced technology, even for it's era.
It certainly wasn't the weakest, but it was surrounded by consoles and home computers with capabilities in the same ballpark.
And let's not forget that the Amiga, while heavily limited in availability early on, first saw the light of day in 1985.
Meanwhile, the BBC Micro, C64, and 64k revisions of the Atari 8 bit home computers are not an exact match for the NES in terms of capabilities, but they're all within broadly the same ballpark. (as demonstrated pretty well by more than a few homebrew titles in recent years)
Arcades vastly outclassed the NES, home microcomputers were already on the verge of being 16 bit systems (or more, in case of PC, though the pricetag was unimpressive.)
No, in context, the NES is decidedly mediocre. Neither amazingly capable, nor amazingly weak.
In fact, if you're going to argue about bleeding edge hardware and Nintendo, the n64 and gamecube are far closer to this.
The n64 had the most powerful 3d capabilities of any console in that period, and even very briefly arguably outgunned the majority of PC's. (which is an otherwise unheard of situation)
Some 3 times more powerful than it's competitors, but hamstrung by some notable design flaws, and the fact that it was pushing graphical effects that took something like 7-8x the processing effort of the competition, on a system that was really only about 3 times as powerful, and since those effects were not THAT dramatically impressive, this had the unfortunate effect of making the system appear slow and lacking in detail.
Which is because it was underpowered for what it was doing, even if highly overpowered compared to what it was competing with.
The NES by contrast is mediocre from the start, and in context of what came later in the same generation, even less impressive.
Nintendo haven't forgotten, in fact, they remembered exactly what the NES was better than you seem to.
They also remember the perpetually worse and worse (n64 and gamecube) results they were getting from actually trying to push bleeding edge hardware, and realised they had to try something else.
which they did. And which so far, has had a better outcome for 2 of 3 attempts.
the most successful spinoff ever
11:47 I don't know if this is true for the version of SMB you played, but on the version that's packed together with Duck Hunt at least, your lives do not loop to 0. Instead, the life counter maxes out somewhere around 100 or so lives.
I think you're confusing that with the AllStars version, which stops at 127. The duckhunt one should still glitch.
...Well dang. I decided to test it out for myself, and sure enough, if you grind too many lives, it resets to 0. In fact, once you hit 0, it's stuck there even if you try to grind more. What's amazing is I've never actually had that happen before, and I used the trick a lot. In fact, there were times that I'd let the time run out so that I could get a go at even more lives. And yet somehow, I always stopped before my lives looped to 0.
The lives actually reset to -127, so to start earting positive lives again you'd have to earn another 127.
That's even goofier than I realzed!
Just how signed one-byte variables work.
The game that is one of the building blocks of the entire gaming industry.
Well, since this video is 23 minutes long, that's probably about 3000 words. The game is 32 kilobytes, which apparently equals about 16,000 words.
Wow. Someone actually worked that out. Well done.
I was really hoping you'd go at least to Legend of Zelda with this series, if not Metroid or even Final Fantasy. Also, you barely mentioned the music, and I wanted to hear more about the dev team and creation process of SMB.
All that said, this is still a fantastic video, and thank you for all the great work you've done to preserve the history of the medium. I hope these videos will last for future generations of game historians to learn from!
those are future years, he'll do em in the next series
I recently played through Alex Kidd in Miracle World (the first time that I'd touched it since the 1980's) and couldn't help but feel that a lot of the deaths felt cheap since the jumping was just a little too floaty. Once you've experienced the jumping mechanics of Mario games, it really is hard to play any platformer that doesn't do them as well.
“Nintendo put it’s ‘top men’ on the project”
I said top. Men.
I'd actually treat at reusing stages as weakness. They should be used in master quest instead.
Although aspect you overlooked in Mario's physics is block nudging. Normally, trying to jump onto a higher platform could be frustrating but when Mario has enough offset from the block above, he is nudged in a way that will make it much easier to get to the higher platform.
she will always be princess toadstool, as far as im concerned.
randallross420 even though she was introduced to me as Princess Toadstool back when I was 5, I still prefer Peach, as it is a more simple name (Which is more than I can say for Robotnik vs. Eggman)
Sir Osis of Thuliver It probably is, but Nintendo never confirmed that.
Sir Osis of Thuliver Toadstool is just her Western name, the same way Dr. Eggman became Dr. Robotnik for the localized version. She was always Princess Peach in Japan. Super Mario 64 tried to make them one in the same by including both during that letter in the intro “Sincerely, Princess Toadstool - Peach” After that one game, however, they pretty much dropped Toadstool altogether.
Yup, and I still refer to Bowser as King Koopa.
To me, she is Peach, with Princess Toadstool being the full title.
I always play without warping. Warping makes the game easier to beat and less fun.
No the game still hard warping
The NES was only available first in NYC/NJ Markets for its first 3 Weeks. It DID reach other Markets in the US by November 1,1985 making its West Coast Debut that day.
It was WIDELY available by Christmas in Most US Markets and Retailers.
Got a source on that?
Man, this video should have a spoiler warning on it!
I kid, I kid. Love that wrap sentence:
SMB was designed to make the most of the NES innate power, but the NES benefited far more from the power of super mario brothers.
Love this video, Jeremy. BTW will we ever see a follow up book to Anatomy of SMB?
No time soon, sorry. I am heavily revamping Anatomy of Castlevania to make the text more expansive and more cogent. Maybe I’ll follow up with Mario someday.
DiC Animation City produced The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (1989) in conjunction with Nintendo of America, The Walt Disney Company and Viacom International
Great video
I think this game would been better with Auto Run and without the left and crouch buttons because then you would only have to focus on two buttons
Happy Patreon and printed book supporter :) Continue this odyssey!
11:45 i just realized the New! super mario bros. wall jump is probably inspired by this glitch.
Oh I just made this connection, since I watched a bunch of videos on Mario and Metriodvanias back to back:
The repeating levels seem out of place since the game is linear, and it doesn't show in the gameplay, but plot-wise, it could be considered the equivalent of backtracking a la Metroid, or at the very least similar to repeating a Mario 64 level for a different goal.
Actually shorter than I thought it might be!
Super Mario bros is still the very best game of all time. 😀👍🎮