Super Mario Bros. Review

Super Mario Bros. arrives in 1985 with a job to do, which is to make a cartridge console worth owning in a market American retailers had already written off. It does the job in about thirty seconds. World 1-1 is the most studied opening in the medium: a Goomba walks at you, a block sits overhead, and a mushroom that looks like an enemy chases you down and turns out to be a reward. You learn the vocabulary without reading a line. Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka build the rest of the game out of that vocabulary and never pad it.

Mario carries momentum. He skids, he accelerates, he keeps some of his speed off a ledge, and the jump answers how long you hold the button, so every gap is a question about commitment rather than timing alone. Thirty two stages fit in a cartridge smaller than a modern screenshot, which is most of the difficulty grade: the clouds and the bushes are the same sprite in two colors, and the game is confident you will not care. The visuals grade sits two steps under the overall for exactly that reason, a picture assembled from a handful of colors per tile, and it is not a complaint, because those silhouettes still read across a room.

The story grade sits far under the overall and it should. There is a princess, a lizard king and a running joke about the wrong castle, and the game has no interest in any of it beyond a reason to keep walking right. What it authors instead is the control feel the entire genre borrowed, and a lesson in teaching by level design that is still on the syllabus.