Always a piece When art comes along that changes culture as we know it, we tend to look at it in a vacuum. But real life doesn’t work that way. Behind every work of art are artists who work at a specific time and place and carry with them the influences and moods of the era. In the 1970s and early 80s, Japanese toy company Nintendo began experimenting with electronic gameplay: virtual skeet shooting with plastic guns, handheld gaming devices, and so on.
Who could have predicted what would happen in 1985 and the lasting impact it would have on the entire entertainment industry?
you can play Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo Switch Online or on the Game & Watch console.
The 1970s oil crisis halted Nintendo’s use of plastic, and promising developments in electronic games fueled the company’s first video game hit: Donkey Kong. The game’s developer and director, Shigeru Miyamoto, was interested in what he called “athletic games,” or those in which a character would run and jump around, often across different platforms. (Gaming culture would eventually settle on the term “platformer.”)
Miyamoto’s interest in this manifested itself in maze games like devil worldSide scrolling games like exciting bike, and like beat ’em ups Kung Fu Master. Working on these smaller, unobtrusive games helped refine Miyamoto’s vision for something else: “a new game where you can strategize while scrolling sideways over long distances,” he described in a Nintendo retrospective. He wanted more movement and colorful backgrounds, a game that’s easy on the eyes.
All of these elements came together in the 1985s Super Mario Bros.a cornerstone of gaming history, available now if you’ve subscribed to the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack.
What can one say SMEs not that yet?
World 1-1 is a master class in teaching a player how to play a game. There’s little Mario, there’s the Goomba coming towards him and there’s the waving question box. Hit the box and you are the big Mario. Hit another box and you have fireballs. It’s simple, elegant and creative.
World 1-2 is less heralded but equally intriguing as it builds on and complicates the player’s experience. Mario enters a warp tube and leaves the sunshine for an underground level where the goombas and turtles take on a dark blue hue. A lucky jump bypassed most of the level and ended up going straight to the Warp Tube, which allowed me to jump between stages. I felt myself and jumped to world 4.
Then the game got noticeably harder. Now the turtles had spikes on their shells, bullet bills were flying at me and an annoying guy with glasses in a cloud was dropping more and more problems right in front of me. I could feel the difficulty increasing in front of me as easily as I could see it.
Higher levels get harder, that’s not a concept SMEs invented, but the way the game represented the idea was revolutionary. Its levels looked different, sometimes radical. Unlike the one-screen world of Donkey Konga player could never be quite sure what came in next Super Mario.
The world of the game feels rich and surprising, especially when you hit the air and end up with a crate or somehow overcome all the dangers and easily make it to the end of the level. Without imposing himself on the players, Super Mario offers a choice totally unexpected in 1985: Do you want to ride down this or that tube? Do you want to break these blocks or not? It’s your choice.
The world of video games would never be the same.
