Welcome to Part 1 of our Mario Bros. retrospective! In our first episode, we cover the origins of Mario, and how he evolved from a carpenter chasing a giant ape in Donkey Kong, through his various early day careers including factory worker, demolitions expert, and of course, plumber. In this series, we aim to tell the story of the Mario Bros. series as it unfolded for North American audiences. As the overall Mario franchise is impossibly large, doing a complete retrospective on the character's career would be a herculean task, so the focus of this series is going to remain on games that derived in some way from the Mario Bros. formula. This means no Kart, Tennis, Dr., or any of that. This also means that aside from the character's arcade origins, no Donkey Kong games will be covered. (We hope to do a Donkey Kong retrospective someday, but whoo boy is THAT a big undertaking, especially in the early days!) But back to this, we are not only looking at the games themselves, but the historical context surrounding them, and what it was like being a fan as these games were being released.

Did you enjoy this? Check out more Stone Age Gamer: Archeology! 

Transcript of the video

It may be hard to imagine, but there was a time when playing video games at home was a relatively novel concept. While home video games existed almost as long as the medium in general, by the mid-1970s a standard had been set. Similar to how movies premiered in theaters, video games were born in the arcade. 

But as video games themselves evolved, so did the marketing strategies around them, and nothing was more successful than having a recognizable brand, especially if that brand was centered around a mascot. While games like Space Invaders and Centipede were capable of phenomenal success, their cultural impact paled in comparison to the likes of arguably video games’ first mascot character, Pac-Man. Not only was the game itself a perfect blend of the “easy to play difficult to master” concept, but the bizarre yet lovable characters that existed within the game’s world took off in a way that no video game had seen before. 

By the late 1970s, a Japanese playing card and toy manufacturer called Nintendo had been toiling away in the arcade scene for a number of years. While some of their offerings were quite creative, the bulk of their output was unabashedly derivative, largely pulling from the basics of Space Invaders. One of their more successful launches in this line was 1979’s Radar Scope. However, when it came time to bring the game to North America, arcade goers in the region had largely moved on from the space shooter genre, and the game quickly became a commercial flop. In order to prevent those unsold cabinets from going to waste, Nintendo repurposed them into something completely different, Donkey Kong. 

Donkey Kong was a huge success, quickly propelling itself to near Pac-Man levels of popularity, and cementing Nintendo as a major force in the industry. Everyone loved the game’s titular ape with the strange yet catchy name, but his career is a whole different story. This is the story of his nemesis, Mario. 

Mario (who was then known as Mr. Video or Jumpman) was a carpenter who had to save his girlfriend from Donkey Kong, an enormous ape who had kidnapped her and fled to a construction site. His design was that of necessity. He had a mustache so you could tell he had facial features. He wore overalls to better illustrate his limbs. But this simple design struck a chord with audiences. Unlike the Q-Berts and Froggers of the time, Mario was human, and while he was by no means the only human in the arcade scene, he was the only one who was paired with mischievous yet lovable Donkey Kong. 

In his debut title, Mario’s movements were limited. He could perform a basic jump and turn on a dime, but that was about it. He was incredibly brittle, dying if he fell from any height higher than his own, or from being hit with any of the game’s many hazards, but he still managed to be remarkably fun to control, something that would soon define his career. 

Donkey Kong was followed up by Donkey Kong Jr., a game where the player no longer controlled Mario, but Donkey Kong’s son. Mario took a much more backseat role in this adventure, as Donkey Kong was by far the more popular character. But the following year, that would all change. 

Nintendo had designs on making Mario a sort of every man in their video game output. Mario was a carpenter in Donkey Kong, but became a helicopter flying, animal caging villain in its sequel. The malleability of the character was already coming into focus, and for his first proper starring role, Nintendo would continue to expand his world by giving him a brother, and assigning the pair a whole new job: factory workers. 

Mario Bros. was released as a Game & Watch title in March 1983, and serves as the source point for a number of notable series firsts. Most importantly, the introduction of Mario’s brother Luigi. At this point, the Mario brothers looked exactly alike aside from the color of their clothing. But it was here that Mario’s new look that was hinted at in some of Donkey Kopng Jr’s artwork was solidified. Where most earlier depictions of the character featured more realistic proportions, Mario could now be seen with a more squat, cartoonish appearance, a look that would remain the basis for his design from this point forward. 

In the game, Mario and Luigi are tasked with preparing shipments at a bottling plant. The brothers have to work together to get the bottles packed and onto various delivery trucks. Like most Game & Watch games, the premise is simple yet addictive, and the multi screen unit performed well, to the extent that several uniquely branded versions were created in conjunction with various food and alcohol distribution companies in Japan. In the US though, Mario Bros. was a neat distraction, but the number of firsts it brought to the table weren’t very apparent to the gaming public as the Game & Watch series was never quite as popular here as it was overseas. Fortunately for Mario, he and his brother were about to make their proper debut in a much larger venue.

Mario Bros. was released in arcades in mid 1983, giving Mario and his brother Luigi a much more mainstream introduction to the world at large. Though the Mario Bros. Game & Watch was technically released first, this was undoubtedly the first proper game in what would become the Mario Bros. franchise. 

This time around, Mario and Luigi were plumbers who were tasked with removing a number of pesky creatures from a series of underground tunnels. In order to do this, the brothers would have to punch the ground underneath the creatures to flip them over, and then kick them away while their defenses were down. They would accomplish this task with the help of what would soon become the franchise’s defining trait, jumping. 

Perhaps the most notable difference between Mario’s abilities in Donkey Kong and here in Mario Bros. was his ability to jump extraordinarily high. No longer susceptible to fall damage either, the Mario Bros were remarkably nimble characters, capable of moving all around each of the game’s stages with ease. The jumps themselves were also considerably more controllable now with the player being able to perform jumps ith different arcs depending on their inertia. This was still limited to only vertical, slightly forward, and fully forward, but this degree of control added a layer of strategy to the game than Donkey Kong’s simple jump physics could ever achieve. 

Aside from Mario’s new gravity-defying jumping abilities, Mario Bros. also introduced several other series mainstays. This is where players first saw the series trademark green pipes, though only enemies could travel through them here. Coins, complete with their trademark sound effect appeared here as well, as did the bros first run in with turtles, seen here in the form of Shellcreepers. 

But like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. was still very much an arcade game, and as such was focused on racking up points rather than embarking a proper adventure. Each single-screen stage of the game provided players with new challenges, like sidesteppers, crabs who needd to be hit twice before they turned over, Fighter Flies who jumped across the landscape, Freezies who could turn a patch of ground into a difficult to maneuver iced surface, and fireballs that would fly across the screen, adding to the chaos. 

And chaos was indeed one of the largest factors in the game’s appeal. As the title suggests, Mario Bros. is a 2-player affair. When more than one player stepped up to the cabinet, both Mario and Luigi would simultaneously play both cooperatively and competitively. The only way to get through the stages was to work together, but each character had their own weight, and could be bounced off of or around much like the enemies, opening the door for no small amount of friendly fire. 

Mario Bros. was a tremendous success for Nintendo. The Mario brothers had stepped into Donkey Kong’s spotlight, and were well on their way to becoming the new face of the company. The game was ported to numerous platforms because while Nintendo had been in the video games business for a couple of years now, they didn’t have much of a presence in the home console space. At least, not yet. 

Around the same time as Mario Bros. hit arcades in Japan, Nintendo also launched the Famicom, an 8-bit home console with interchangeable cartridges. Its main claim to fame upon its release was its ability to play a near arcade perfect rendition of Donkey Kong, but another feather in its cap came in the form of what was at the time, an incredibly faithful home port of Mario Bros. These games, in addition to a number of other revolutionary works for the time, helped the Famicom handily outperform its competition. Nintendo now had a strong foothold in the world of home video games, a business they could exhibit far more control over than they ever could in arcades. The Famicom’s price point and library quickly made it one of the most popular gaming machines on the market. 

With all of this success surrounding Mario Bros., Nintendo wasted no time in creating a followup with Mario’s lead designer, Shigeru Miyamoto at the helm, and a surprisingly ambitious one at that. But this time, the game wouldn’t be designed with arcades at heart. Instead, it would be made specifically for Nintendo’s Famicom hardware, and it would push the system to its absolute limits. 

But while Miyamoto and his team began working on this bold new direction for the franchise, the other creative minds behind Mario Bros., were also working on their own new take on the formula. And strangely enough, they weren’t the only ones.  

In 1984, Hudson Soft created two new officially licensed Mario Bros. games for the Japanese PC market. First came Mario Bros. Special, which involved Mario having to make his way to the top of a screen, avoiding hazards and pressing switches. This was followed by the bizarre Punch Ball Mario Bros., a variation on the original formula that involved Mario punching a ball around the screen to defeat numerous enemies. 

Neither of these games enjoyed much in terms of success, and never properly left Japan. But over at Nintendo, Mario and Luigi’s next Famicom excursion was ready to go, as the Bros. found themselves with yet another new profession, demolitions experts. 

Wrecking Crew released as a launch title for the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in 1985. The game serves as an interesting take on the Mario formula up to his point, and plays almost like a cross between Mario Bros. and the original Donkey Kong. 

Where Mario Bros. stages were cleared by defeating all the enemies, Wrecking Crew turned that formula on its head by making the enemies indestructible, and instead changing the goal to making the player destroy all of the structures. Mario has also lost his now signature jumping ability, which makes this more of a puzzle platformer than a typical action game. Of course, both Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong weren’t completely devoid of this type of thinking, as each game required players to figure out the best course of action in order to accomplish a particular stage’s goals unscathed, but Wrecking Crew leans more heavily into the methodical territory. The game doesn’t feature a bonus timer of any sort, meaning that the overall pace is considerably more leisurely. With The exception of course of the fireballs from Mario Bros. making their return to prevent players from staying in one place for too long. 

Mario has to use a hammer to destroy a series of walls and ladders while avoiding enemies. Completing this task will allow him to advance to the next stage, of which there are 100 in total, each laid out in a unique pattern. Unlike previous Mario games, Wrecking Crew is a game that’s incredibly easy to soft lock, that is to say, get yourself into a situation that you can’t get out of. Your only options then being to either reset your game, or wait for an enemy or fireball to kill you. Resetting the game causes your score to reset, but you can also freely choose whichever stage you’d like to start at on the game’s title screen. 

And while it may not seem like it at first glance, Luigi is actually in this game too, albeit in such a limited fashion that he doesn’t even have his own green color palette. He looks identical to Mario, except where the player’s lives counter is, it says Luigi instead of Mario. 

Wrecking Crew is an odd game, and only ever enjoyed a moderate level of success here in the US. Still it has managed to maintain a degree of relevance even after all these years, being referenced in numerous newer Nintendo titles, and being regularly rereleased over the generations. It, along with Hudson’s PC releases, illustrate just how much can be drawn from the formula that Mario Bros. established, a formula that would be revisited again down the road. 

But here in the US, Wrecking Crew, and even Nintendo’s extremely faithful arcade ports of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. weren’t nearly as impressive in 1985. Especially not when stacked up against the game that launched the Famicom’s US reinvention, the Nintendo Entertainment System. 

Mario Bros. may have been a revelation. But its sequel would be a revolution.  

Join us next time as Mario gets super, and redefines just how popular a video game can be.