25 Years of Super Mario Bros.

harrymcc writes "On September 13th 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom (NES) in Japan. It went on to become the best-selling video game of all time, a title it only recently lost. Over at Technologizer, Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with a look at some of the weirdest variations, spinoffs, and tributes the game has inspired over the years, from edibles to art projects." The Guardian's games blog adds a bunch of Mario-related trivia, and CVG attempts to explain the history of Mario games. Nintendo is capitalizing on the anniversary by announcing an upcoming collection of classic Mario games (Japanese site, English explanation) that have been ported to the Wii.

Comments

Twenty-five years?

[MyLongNickName]

Twenty-five years? Really? Damn... I'm old.

Re:Twenty-five years?

[Hatta]

It's not as hard as you remember it. Anyone with a little aptitude and practice can beat SMB. Compared to other games on the NES (Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, etc) it's a walk in the park.

Re:Twenty-five years?

[ProppaT]

The Adventure of Link wasn't all that hard, honestly.

You want difficult? Play Battletoads. I think that's the game that invented controller throwing.

Re:Twenty-five years?

[Alexandra Erenhart]

Old 8 and 16 bits games beat the crap out of most recent games when it comes to difficulty. Nowdays it seems it's all about eye candy (cough cough I'm looking at you FFXIII), but the games never last more than 20-30 hours unless they're mmorpgs or really good rpgs/adventure games. And even then they're rather easy and you go through content without much problems. Kids and teenager gamers have no idea what they missed.

Re:Twenty-five years?

[teslar]

being knocked back uncontrollably by enemies (often into pits)

What, as opposed to being knocked very uncontrollably onto a health pack? Why would an enemy want to do that? Surely knocking you into pits or at least making sure you lose control is pretty high up on the enemy's to-do list, so while I agree with the rest of what you say, this is a strange criticism.

You should also add bad English to the list of things that make some games difficult. What were supposed to be helpful hints become mere cryptic messages. I'm looking at you, original Zelda.
Then there were things that simply made no sense. Why could the blue candle only be lit once per screen, forcing you to exit and re-enter it until you've checked every damn bush (or several of them at once, but still) for something shiny? Things like that just made the game longer not by making it harder but simply by increasing the legwork you had to do. I think those were the things I hated most. Bad controls and so on, I could live with - eventually, you learned how to master them. You figured out what the actual collision detection was rather than what it should have been. You understood where a particular enemy would throw you and could use it to your advantage if the guy was really unavoidable. But spending 5 mins on burning bushes just cos the blue candle is rubbish? Please.

Re:really?

[MyLongNickName]

Get off my lawn!

Re:Who's #1 then

[Pojut]

Super Mario Bros was also a pack in title, for quite a long time.

How are so many people forgetting this?

Re:Heads up on that Mario collection

[AndrewNeo]

There is a difference though, where the games on VC are NES games, and Super Mario All Stars is an SNES game. The graphics and sound are a higher quality.

Re:The Best-Selling Video Game of All Time...

[hansamurai]

If we're including pack-in games (which Wii Sports is in North America, but not in Japan), then wouldn't Solitaire be the best selling game of all time? It was "sold" with hundreds of millions of copies of Windows.

Re:And yet...

[DIplomatic]

...games released this year will be based on the same characters, plot devices and game mechanics as that title a quarter century ago. It's all summed up in Nintendo's motto: Why create when you can copy?

And yet I would rather play 100 games that feature Mario unnecessarily than yet another greyish-brown FPS where the protagonist is some sort of grizzled space marine. Say what you will about Nintendo and Mario games, but by and large they are fun.

Re:Interesting product but not economical

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

So they are offering the first 4 Super Mario Bros games on one disc for around $30. The same 4 games can be purchased for your Wii through the virtual console for $5 each - totaling $20.

The disc has the Super Mario All Stars (16-bit) versions of the games. Unless SMAS is on the SNES Virtual Console, you're not getting the same games, you're getting the versions with much better graphics and sound.

On an un-related note, I worked at Funcoland back when the original Playstation and N64 came out. We dealt primarily with used games and we could not keep Super Mario All Stars in stock to save our lives. They'd actually pay up to $30 in store credit to get that collection and nobody wanted to give it up. I don't blame them. It was a nice upgrade and they even retained the glitches that made the first one so charming.

Re:The Best-Selling Video Game of All Time...

[HelioWalton]

Same. I think in the end though, I bought around 25 of them. Reselling the set parted out (wiimote, and game individually) netted a nice profit...

I always preferred playing with my Willie...

[pandrijeczko]

...that of course being Miner Willie from the ZX Spectrum classics Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy.

I'm not criticising anyone's love of the Mario franchise of games but having gamed for 30-odd years from the ZX Spectrum through the Commodore Amiga and now to PCs, I think I've only ever played one Mario game for a short period of time on a friend's NES.

So my platform gaming heroes were Zool, Superfrog, Manic Miner and Wally Week (from Automania & Pyjamarama).

Re:What the collection *should* be...

[SnarfQuest]

Shouldn't they include the movie too? Keep the bad along with the good.?