Thirty years ago, a small team based in Kyoto, Japan, came together to create a new kind of action game. Drawing inspiration from prior projects, that team released Super Mario Bros. in 1985 – a title that would go on to help console gaming step back from the brink of ruin. Since then, Mario’s influence has spread far beyond the games in which he appears. He helped turn Nintendo into an industry leader, and became a cultural icon. Super Mario Bros. started a revolution, and in the process, became one of the most recognizable franchises in the world.
This article originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of Game Informer. We're re-sharing this story today as a part of Super Mario's 35th anniversary celebration.
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Humble Origins
In the early 1980s, the video game industry’s push into the home-console market was at a pivotal stage. Turmoil permeated gaming as the North American industry crashed in 1983. Industry-wide sales dropped as low as $100 million in 1985 (down from over $3 billion just three years before), sending many developers and publishers to their demise. Despite this downturn in the industry, Nintendo was able to survive while many of its competitors faltered thanks to the success of its 1983 game console, the Famicom. With the console releasing in Japan at the start of the North American crash, Nintendo was able to navigate through the storm that took down so many of its competitors.
That’s not to say that Nintendo was unaffected by the crash. Negotiations with Atari to help bring the Famicom to the United States as the “Nintendo Enhanced Video System” fell apart as Atari took a massive financial hit in the crash, and Nintendo was forced to attempt the jump to the West alone. When the company tried to release it in the U.S., toy stores (the primary sellers of video games at the time) had all but written off the medium as a fad that had ended, and were resistant to stocking games. To overcome this, Nintendo rebranded its video game console as an “entertainment system,” and the NES was born.
Thanks to some bold risks by the business side of Nintendo, the NES was set to be sold in North America in 1985, but it still needed killer software to make sure it was the hit that could justify those risks. That justification came in the form of Super Mario Bros., a game developed by a team led by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. Revolutionary from its conceptualization, Super Mario Bros. took the ideas found in the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. and pushed them forward in unprecedented ways.
While Mario Bros. featured small characters on a single, dark screen, Mario’s next adventure was much more ambitious. “The idea for Super Mario Bros. was born at a meeting where I presented my desire to create a bigger hero who runs around in a setting with beautiful graphics,” Tezuka said in a 2015 Nintendo video promoting Super Mario Maker. “We discussed whether this will appeal to the current market and brainstormed new ideas.”
One of those new ideas was to have the level scroll as Mario moved through the environment. “It used to be normal for Famicom games to have stages that didn’t scroll,” Miyamoto said in the promotional video. “There was side-scrolling for some shooting games, but not for any other. We wanted to create a game where large characters are animated in land, sea, and sky settings.”
The team hammered out the concepts and began creating the levels that would go on to define the side-scrolling platformer genre.
“At the time, we didn’t really use computerized tools,” Tezuka said in that video. “Instead, we hand-drew the stages and inputted data based on those drawings. For example, we drew the layout of the stage on graph paper…and then we handed it over to the programmer, who inputted it after converting it to numerical data. We didn’t see the finished course until the next day or so. We took this process very seriously. Because programmers put a lot of time inserting this data manually, we couldn’t slack off or experiment too much with the program.”
Since the process of inputting the data was so labor intensive, Miyamoto says that the programmers would often scold the team if they made too many edits. Given these limitations, planning ahead was a crucial part of the creation process. “We wrote out what kinds of stages we wanted to create on a giant whiteboard, then we created a layout by pasting notes on the board like what the background should be or what would appear,” he said in the promo video.
Though it would eventually go on to change video games as they were known at the time, Tezuka tells us that he couldn’t accurately assess the magnitude of what the team had accomplished thanks to his lack of experience. The team was proud of the finished product, but they had no clue that Super Mario Bros. would go on to spark the beginning of the home console revolution.
Slowly, the team began hearing positive feedback. “Not long after its release, I did have a bit of an impression that people were enjoying Super Mario Bros.,” Tezuka says. “There wasn’t any place like the internet for people to exchange information, but I could hear feedback from my friends. I didn’t think we did anything groundbreaking, but I definitely felt happy to hear that feedback.”
Once the game hit U.S. store shelves, however, there was no doubt about its success. Serving as the system’s pack-in game, Super Mario Bros. propelled the timidly selling Nintendo Entertainment System to the must-have “toy” of the 1986 holiday season and set the stage for the game’s sequel to be a massive hit.
The Doki Doki Decision
Super Mario Bros. inspired a direct sequel in Japan just a year later. The Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 used many of the same assets and ideas from the original, but that version didn’t make it to the United States. Instead, Nintendo released a modified version of a different game – one from the Famicom Disk System, a Japan-only accessory that allowed the original Famicom to play games off floppy disks instead of cartridges. The game, Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, was rebranded with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Toadstool as playable characters.
“Doki Doki Panic was created in tandem with an exposition that only ever took place in Japan [Ed. Note – The expo was called Yume Kōjō '87], but the game was really unique and packed with all kinds of fun things,” Tezuka says. “We weren’t able to release the original Disk System Super Mario Bros. 2 outside of Japan, but I think the idea of putting Mario in Doki Doki Panic and remaking it into Mario 2 overseas so people around the world could enjoy it was a really good one.”
Though it was drastically different than the Japanese version, the North American audience embraced Super Mario Bros. 2 when it launched in 1988. The NES sold out across the country yet again, and parents found themselves waiting in long lines trying to grab an NES for their children during the holiday season. A reworked and cleaned-up version of the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 eventually released in the United States as The Lost Levels as a part of the Super Mario All-Stars package for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993.
Despite the United States’ Super Mario Bros. 2 not being the original sequel his team developed, Miyamoto speaks very highly of it in discussing his favorite games in the series. In a 2012 interview with IGN, he said that while he has a lot of memories related to the first Super Mario Bros., he might actually favor the U.S. sequel. “Perhaps as a player, I might go for what was, at least in Japan, we referred to it as Super Mario USA, which was a game that just had a very different sort of feel. I think we had such a loose approach to it, we really came up with something interesting."