Super Mario Bros

Where and when did you first play this game?

Super Mario Bros was my first game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) , which I seem to remember I got in 1986 for my tenth birthday. I remember opening the box, pulling out the games, controllers, the Zapper and running to my room so I could hook it up on my television.

How many times have you played this game? Have you replayed the game since you first played it?

I’ve played Super Mario Bros, and almost all the other side scrolling versions of the game, dozens of times over the years. I used to play it on the NES over and over because of the great replay-ablity, but it was replaced later by Super Mario Bros 3. SMB3 was great because of the new level design, less linear style of game play and new power ups, but even today classic SMB is still a great game!

What is it about this game that you loved?

What gamer hasn’t played a Super Mario Bros game at some point in their life? Super Mario Bros is like Pac-man. It’s been widely played and is known the world over. To me, Super Mario Bros was a huge advance in the side scrolling games by taking classic Donkey Kong characters in the Mushroom Kingdom on a quest to save the Princess from the King Koopa, Bowser. The game was quickly ported over to the Nintendo Entertainment System as one of the launch titles for the system.

Super Mario Bros was originally an arcade game, which utilized the Mario character from the Donkey Kong series. Mario and his brother Luigi took an acid trip break from trying to capture Donkey Kong in another arcade game, called Mario Bros. Mario Bros was a simply platform game which was a single screen much like other games of the time period.

What is the best (or worst) moment in this game? Or what about this game made it memorable?

This game has all these different styles of worlds, like an icy world, night time worlds, water worlds, and, of course, lava world. Liquid hot magma. I played this game to death when I got the NES, well until I got Legend of Zelda and Mario Bros 2! I remember coming across the Warp Zone completely by accident one day while playing it with a friend of mine. We nearly shit our pants because we had no idea that was even there! Amazing how we got so excited about that, but it was a big deal since it allowed us to skip whole worlds, which were just difficult to play at times.

I also remember when you jumped on the enemies heads, the little points would appear on screen, 100, 1000, 500, etc. Amazing! That was the first time I seem to remember that happening on a home console system.

Is there a special story about this game? Maybe an event in your life or some thing memorable you associate with this game?

I remember my brother, Matt, not being really very impressed with the NES at the time. He owned the Sega Master System, which did have some really great games on that system. But I was totally enthralled with the fact I was playing the Super Mario Bros for the arcade on my home system. It was the bomb. Not to mention, I think this was the first time this was actually mine, and not Matt’s or the family’s system.

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