MARIO PLATFORM SUPERSTAR

When you look at the 2D platform genre, one series stands alone as the king of the craft – Mario. We’re sure that some people want to argue with that, but when push comes to shove and the public has its say, it tells us that the 2D Mario games are brilliant. You lot voted Super Mario Bros 3 as the best NES game ever, and declared Super Mario World to be the greatest game of all time. The sales of the games are frequently measured in the tens of millions rather than mere millions, and it’s worth considering that for all the critical love directed towards the 3D entries in the series, their commercial performance pales in comparison – New Super Mario Bros Wii outsold both SuperMarioGalaxy gamescombined. But what makes the games so great?

To really tackle that question, we need to look back to the very first game – one that is remarkably poorly documented, given its importance. Historians can’t even agree on its North American release date, and because of the diminished importance of the console scene in the west during the mid-Eighties, there are very few contemporary reviews. Thankfully, the experts of the time can remember the impact that it made on them. One of those experts was Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall, who was offered the chance to play an American NES console in early 1986, during a visit to Activision. “Needless to say, I jumped at the chance,” he recalls. “I played Excitebike first,which was really enjoyable, but then I plugged in Super Mario Bros and was absolutely blown away.”

Why did the game make such an impression? “The smoothness of the fullscreen scrolling was deeply impressive, and the graphics, music, feel of the controls, and the overall gameplay were all incredibly well polished, designed, and presented,” Julian highlights. “It made most of the Commodore 64 games I was playing at the time feel old-fashioned and rather clunky. Comparatively, Super Mario Bros looked and felt like a full-on arcade machine. I immediately fell in love with the game, and couldn’t stop thinking about it as I travelled back home to Ludlow on the train. I absolutely had to get a Nintendo Entertainment System, and the moment it was officially released in the UK a year or so later, I rushed out and bought one.”

The design of the game was a huge step up compared to the game’s predecessor, Mario Bros. That game had offered single-screen action with fixed level designs. By comparison, Super Mario Bros had