Just to be clear, this is the NES Super Mario Bros. not to get confused with the Mario Bros. arcade game for you dumbasses out there.
Before:
To begin our journey, we must travel far into the past to the year 1977. This is the year where a young Shigeru Miyamoto starts his journey as a video game developer at Nintendo in Japan. His first video game that he worked on was a game called Radar Scope for arcades. It was released in 1979 in Japan and 1980 in the US. The game can be described as a cross between Space Invaders and Galaga.
"Pretty colors."
Unfortunately, the game was a commercial failure in America, but popular for a short time in Japan. Since the game was no bueno, Shigeru Miyamoto was given the task to "fix" the game so it would appeal to more gamers. Instead of just fixing the game, he created a entirely new game based off the hardware of Radar Scope. This game is now known in America as Donkey Kong. The game itself was created because Nintendo was trying to create a Popeye arcade game, but lost the copyrights. So out of laziness to not create a new game, the main character, Popeye, became Jumpman or Mario who was a carpenter, Olive Oyl became The Lady/Pauline, and Bluto became a gorilla. The inspiration for Jumpman came from the landlord of the company.
"I didn't know Popeye had a moustache."
There are myths out there that say that Donkey Kong was originally supposed to be titled by another name. One myth says that Shigeru Miyamoto used a Japanese-English dictionary to find something that meant "stuborn gorilla" and "Donkey" conveyed "stuborn" and "Kong" was Japanese slang for "gorilla".Another myth says that the game was supposed to be called "Monkey Kong" but got misspelled or misinterpreted in a phonecall or bad fax. Whatever happened, the game became a huge success in the US and Japan being ported to system from the Apple II to the Nintendo 64. There are also clones of the game produced by Sega and Tiger Electronics. As a follow-up to Donkey Kong, the arcade game Mario Bros. was produced. The protagonist in the previous game, Jumpman, was renamed Mario and was now a plumber instead of a carpenter. Mario was also given a brother, Luigi, who was also a plumber and they were investigating the sewers of New York to go after the strange creatures down there.
"Remember not to flush turtles down the toilet kids!"
This game was the start of the Mario series, and like Donkey Kong, it was wildly popular being ported to many systems. To follow up the lines of popular arcade games, Nintendo decided to release a cartridge based home console in Japan in 1983 called the Famicom.
"How can this be an NES? I don't know."
Even though after a recall of the system because of a bad chip that caused the games to crash, the system became a huge success in Japan. In 1985, Nintendo released the American version of the Famicom calling it the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for short.
"I can hear the beeps and boops just thinking
about it."
The system on its release had 18 launch titles and one of these titles is Super Mario Bros.
"If you were lazy, you took the warp
zone like me"
After:
After the release of Super Mario Bros., Nintendo had what Borat calls "great sucess." Nintendo finally had a mascot for their company. In Japan, a remake of Super Mario Bros. was released in short supply based on the All Night Nippon radio show having the enemies and other characters looking like people involved with the radio show and famous DJs and musicians of Japan at the time.
"This is what Mario sees when he has a mushroom."
Also, there were sequals to Super Mario Bros. such as the imfamous Super Mario Bros. 2. This game was different in Japan and the US. In Japan the game looked like a direct sequal to the original Super Mario Bros..
"I like that game."
Unfortunately, this game wasn't released in America until 1993 in Super Mario All Stars under the name Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels. The Super Mario Bros. 2 that was released in the US was the remake of a Famicom game in Japan called Doki Doki Panic and replaced the original cast of characters with Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad.
"I don't like those games. They suck."
Since I don't have the time to talk about all the Mario games, I'll just talk about the last Super Mario Bros. sequal on the NES, Super Mario Bros. 3.
This is considered one of the best Mario games of all time.
"Hallelujah!"
This game had many innovations in the Mario franchise such as having more stages in levels, mini games, and new power-ups such as the "Tanooki Suit"
and the "Big Leaf". There are many other video games featuring Mario. Some good, some good as shit. But the Mario franchise is still going on strong still producing games that are selling in the millions. There is no doubt that Mario has had a very large impact on the video game industry and helped put Nintendo in the position it is today. Now, to close this article, time to have Mario stare into your soul.
"All obey Mario!"
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