Super Mario Bros.: Stories, Facts, And Trivia You Didn't Know About The Video Game

 

Released in 1985, Super Mario Bros. began as the last pantheon of the cartridge era for Nintendo and became the game after which everything was measured. Mario has had three decades of monumental success, with a film, a few cartoons, and of course, a myriad of sequels that have players glued to their consoles. How this simple 2-D platformer came to life and inspired a lot for every game for the next 35 years is the story of a small group of creatives who put their talents to 31 kilobytes of data, gluing glitches and boundaries. Gameplay.

The Real Mario Map

Growing up in the Japanese city of Sonobe, a rural town northwest of Kyoto, Mario maker Shigeru Miyamoto was fond of two things: expeditions into the countryside and drawing. He told NPR:

I spent a lot of my time playing in rice skulls and walking the hills and having fun outside. When I reached the era of upper primary school - I really got into hiking and mountain climbing. There is a place near Kobe where there is a mountain, and you climb the mountain, and near its top is a big lake. We went hiking and climbed the mountain, and I was very amazed.

It was these types of scenarios that inspired the different levels and worlds of his two most famous franchises, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. He really initially wanted to draw manga, but when he fell into game design at Nintendo, he found it the perfect medium to recreate Sonobe's vastness. He even used his swimming experience as a reference for the underwater scenes of Super Mario 64. 

The Anonymous Treadman

When he initially appeared as Donkey Kong's hero, Mario was just called "Jumpman" because, well, he jumped and he was a man. Due to the graphical limitations, he was just a short man with a hat instead of hair and a mustache so designers didn't have to make a nose. When it came time to name him, Miyamoto postponed Nintendo's US office. At the time, the company was not doing so well, but their landlord, Mario Segel, gave them a break, and a star was born.

But Mario could be named anything; For Miamoto, he was just a blue-collar man doing his job. In fact, Mario is a jack of all trades:

In Donkey Kong, Mario was actually a carpenter, and he was working on a building, and then the next game we did after that, was a game called Mario Bros., and it was a game that played sewers. And was set in pipes. There were green, and turtles coming out of the pipes. And so we thought, in this game, it would make sense that Mario would be a plumber because of all the pipes. And so that's where the plumber came from. But my view of Mario has always been that he is like a representative of everyone. He is like a blue-collar hero. And that's why we chose these roles for him which were things like carpenter and plumber. 

Behind the Curtain

Have you ever wondered why Super Mario Bros. characters are ready to race each other in go-karts or fight against characters in Super Smash Bros. against tag memorials? This is because they are not really enemies. Drawing on the comics of his youth, Miamoto feels that Super Mario Bros. characters are more like "groups of actors" than enemies, which is why Super Mario Bros. 3 has a veil at the beginning: 3

If you're familiar with things like Poppy and some older comic characters, you'll often see this cast of characters with different roles depending on the comic or cartoon. They can be businessmen in one [cartoon] or pirates in another. They will change roles based on the story being told. So, to some extent, I look at my characters equally and feel that they can perform different roles in different games.

Laborious plot

Before Super Mario Bros. went into production, each game was hand drawn on graph paper to determine what each pixel needed to be. If they make a mistake, the designers don't use the wight-out - they've put the opaque tracing paper on top of the level and made several improvements. It was a difficult path to work on, but it made an incredibly detailed game. The first tier was actually the second tier, drawn by Miamoto, and then his designers created an easy version for World 1-1.

Enemy that was almost no

One of the most recognizable enemies of Super Mario Bros., Gomba, is a small mushroom-looking creep you've got for the stamp if you want to make it to the castle at the end of the level. Even though these ugly little weird pops pop up in every level of the game, they were not added until the final design stage. Takashi Tejukum, a Nintendo executive who worked in games such as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, explained:

[The game] was actually only Koopa Troopas. Then when we got people to play the game, they would say that it was very difficult to face the Koppa Troopas at the very beginning ... so we decided that we should make an enemy that you can easily kill with a single blow . So we made it so that the player's first enemy was Gomba. But we made it to the end.

In fact, by the time the team arrived around to add the characters, they realized that they were out of memory. To get around that, he created a single static image that is animated by simply flipping back and forth.

Doo Doot Doot

Musician Koji Kando has done more work for the orchestra world than anyone since that Beethoven boy. Even if you do not know his name, if you have played video games in the last three decades, you will feel his influence. Kondo composed the music for Super Mario Bros. and several iterations of The Legend of Zelda include two franchises that have the most memorable music of the 20th century. The overworld theme of Super Mario Bros. is so appealing that it also allowed Beatle to sit down and take notice. Kondo said that when he was introduced to Paul McCartney, the famous hitmaker got so excited that he sang a raga for the composer and then right there.

Dustin Hoffman as ... Mario?

In the 90s, film and game companies were not entirely sure how to make something playable on the big screen, but they knew it would make a lot of money. We ended up with the movie Super Mario Bros., but before anyone knew how bad it was going to be, Rain Man star Dustin Hoffman campaigned relentlessly for the lead role. Unfortunately, former US president of Nintendo Minoru Arakawa did not see him as a pixelated plumber, and when the film was released in 1993, it was a serious dystopian sci-fi thing starring Bob Hawkins. He did his best, but it could have been a two-time Academy Award winner in a red suit.

Record breaking sales

If you are old enough to buy Super Mario Bros. in stores, you can start cleaning your garage. In 2020, a rare version of the Nintendo cartridge, sealed in a black box and packed with cardboard hang tabs, was sold at auction for $ 114,000, the most ever paid for a video game. (Later versions of the game did not feature the cardboard hang tab, which is why this edition is such a valuable collector's item.) It is possible that if it had been another game, it would not have sold out, But Super Mario Bros. is such a big part of our culture that people will pay top dollar to own a small piece of its history.