As the franchise that established foundational game design as we know it, it goes without saying that the original Super Mario Bros is paramount in permanently shaping the gaming landscape. I’d go so far to say that it was the bridge that gapped the distance between arcade ventures and modern home consoles, ushering the start of the multi-billion dollar video games industry. More on that at a later date. For now let’s focus on the actual game itself. By now mostly everyone should be familiar with the iconic Mario blueprint. What many people might not realize is how much of the franchise was established in the first game. Enemy types that would become mainstays like the Goombas and Koopas, powerups like the Fire Flower and Starman, and long-time mechanics like using flagstaffs to end levels.

The original Super Mario Bros is naturally a very pick-up-and-play game, being split up into 8 different worlds with 4 stages each. Along the way to save the Mushroom Kingdom Princess from Bowser you have to platform across basic structures, avoid projectiles, fight enemies, and gain powerups to boost your abilities and health. The four primary level types are underground, castle, underwater, and aboveground levels. Add in some warp pipes that let you skip certain stages and that’s really all there is to it. Not just owing to its age, Super Mario Bros is the fundamental distillation of what a platformer is. Part of what makes it so successful is the ability for anyone to jump in, understand, and have some fun with the decently challenging game. And don’t be fooled, it can be quite challenging.

This leads us to my one real gripe with the game. The limited lives is fine, but It feels like Mario is walking on ice the entire time. It’s way too hard to control for precise jumps or while you’re in the air at all. If you can somehow overcome that, the game is actually pretty easy otherwise. But man, I lost way too many lives by Mario getting a mind of his own and walking off the map. In light of that I’d advise you to just take it a bit slower than you would normally. It’s not a long game after all, don’t sweat taking your time with certain platform sections. Past that not much more can be said. The original Mario often gets overshadowed by future titles, and probably rightfully so. It’s an OG classic that holds up fantastically compared to its age, but beyond nostalgic or historic value there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better or more in-depth in later games.

Decided to play this on a whim on the NSO service and had a blast! Definitely as hard a game as people talk it up to be (had to use the rewind function a lot) but it was a really fun time!

Worlds 1 & 2 were about standard fare for what you'd expect from Mario, fair challenge but nothing too hard to warm up the player to what to expect from the game. World 3 is when difficulty starts ramping up and the dreaded hammer bros begin appearing. I definitely see why people despise them in the 2D games, they're tough.

The water physics were actually okay enough for a NES game, though I imagine that's because unlike later games they don't really slow you down much and it's easy to move through the water. I actually found the warp zone in World 4 because I was curious what would happen if I went above the entire level via the bricks on the top of the screen and skipped to World 5, where the difficulty really started getting rough. I also came to despise Lakitu and the Spinies he would drop non stop throughout these levels, but he provided a good challenge I admit.

Since I didn't use a guide I didn't know I could run until World 7-4, which explained my question of why I thought I couldn't reach the top of the flagpoles at the end of levels. Also, I'll admit I'm not a fan of the puzzle in World 7-4 where you have to jump in a certain order to get to Bowser or else be stuck in an endless loop forever on a time limit. If there were clearer indicators (or any indicators at all) on what to do to beat the level I'd be more forgiving, but I feel bad for players who had to figure this part out on their own with no guidance. Thankfully that's the only really unfair part of this game I feel that isn't just more tough game balancing.

However! By the same token I do think that world 8-4's puzzle is a lot more fair. The game actually does give you an indicator that you're bound to notice after playing enough times. The Piranha Plant in one of the warp pipes you can take mysteriously disappears once you get close enough to it, which hasn't happened at all in the game up to that point. So it suggests to the player something's odd about that pipe and tempts you to check it out, which will then let you warp and realize that different warp pipes take you different places, which is good game design. I was able to figure out that puzzle without much issue.

Overall, pretty fun time and a good introduction to Mario, though it should go without saying to definitely play this game on some form of Virtual Console that lets you save state so you don't need to start from the very beginning every time you get a game over, coins and lives are very sparse in this game compared to later ones, very unforgiving. It was really nice to just have a short game to binge through in one sitting without any extra content and distractions to stop you from going from Point A to B though, honestly. Nice change of pace for me.

It's a good game but I didn't expected it to go this hard. Thank god I used save states, because without them I wouldn't make it past the second world and I don't know how did they put eight of them in total. While its gameplay and level design are phenomenal (most of the time, worsened towards the final worlds but not to a point it becomes trash), it feels waay too stretched out for a game that doesn't have a save game option and relies on trial and error, especially in the castles. And don't tell me it's due to technical limitations, Star Tropics had a saving system!

I think most people didn't make it to the ending, not because it's a bad/mediocre game but because how hard it is, I lasted almost two hours, and that was "cheating", I wonder how normal people (people who don't do speedruns/compete/play professionally) would beat the game in one sitting.