Nintendopolis: Super Mario Brothers

When I was growing up in the mid-90s, every kid on the block had to take sides in a vicious, brutal contest. Whole families were torn apart; lines in the sand were dutifully drawn. That conflict is thusly stated: who would win in a fight between Mario, a plumber from Brooklyn, and Sonic, a blue hedgehog that runs real fast.

At the time, there were only two console gaming companies that really mattered in the US, both of them owned and operated by Japanese game makers. These were, of course, Nintendo and Sega. While the irreconcilable march of time has shown that, in the end, Nintendo was the more steadfast of the two, Sega, in their prime, was a force to be reckoned with. Neither side gave quarter; neither asked it. The two giants simply did their level best to destroy each other, and we, the collective gaming community, profited from their competition.

I always came down on the Nintendo side of things. In considering the source of my life-long obsession with Nintendo's various mascots – Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, and Samus Aran, among other – I realize that it stems from first impressions as much as anything.

Back then (the mid-90s, you'll recall) Nintendo and Sega were both on their second consoles – the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (known originally as the “Super Famicom”, short for Family Computer, in its home country of Japan), and the Sega Genesis. But console gaming captured my attention much earlier than that.

I can't remember the first game I ever played, but I am almost positive it was Super Mario Brothers. This game does not really stand up too well to the test of time, primarily because the graphics are extremely pixelated, and the controls, by today's standards, are woefully unresponsive. But this seminal game was responsible for creating a generation of rabid fans, myself included.

What was it about this seemingly simple game that captured the imagination of so many, children and adults alike (but let's face it, mostly children)? I can remember going to my aunt and uncle's house when I was a kid, a regular occurrence given that my hair continued to grow, and my aunt could cut it for free. This house, a holdout of the glory days of the 1980s, was the place where I first experienced video games. My aunt would cut my hair, and meanwhile my uncle would entertain me with the latest games on his shiny new Nintendo Entertainment System, the first console of its kind in America. I would sit at his feet for hours, begging him to play just one more level, or better still, to let me try.

Super Mario Brothers was an innovative game. It updated the basic platforming conventions proposed by earlier games like Pitfall, and established many of the ideas that paved the way for the 2D side-scrolling games of the 90s. Mario had a crucial weakness, one which did not quite bleed over into his myriad sequel adventures: he could not run beyond the left boundary of the screen. Mario's single-minded focus on moving to the right created a sense of purpose in the gamer. Unlike today's sandbox games where there is little to no direction given to the player, Mario fans had no choice but to continue along the linear path set out for them by the game.

Careful players might discover, however, that Mario did not necessarily have to play the levels in the order set out. Hidden warp zones allowed players to skip entire worlds (a world being, in this case, a collection of four stages), but only the most enterprising players might discover these secrets.

Of course, my uncle knew all their locations, and he dutifully passed on this knowledge to me. I committed it to memory twenty years ago, and I still know that the first warp zone is at the end of 1-2 (you take the elevator platform to the top of the screen and jump onto the ceiling, of course!). In turn, I will pass this knowledge onto my children someday, and they will become vested guardians of this hallowed gaming secret.

So is it this structure that makes Mario so compelling? The forced linearity, combined with the hidden ability to jump forward? Partially. But there's more too it.

Mario, unlike many of his contemporaries, was a shape-shifter. In the spirit of his spiritual predecessor, Donkey Kong's Jumpman, Mario could pick up objects to gain greater power, eventually becoming a fire-spewing monster of unparalleled might.

His arsenal of power ups capped out at two: a mushroom and a fire flower. This seems limited to today's attention deficit gamers, hooked on picking up new guns or gaining new abilities, multiple colored bars representing hit points, magic points, skill points, experience points, any number of growth mechanisms. Mario didn't need such trivialities.

Mario, at any given time, ran the risk of losing everything he had gained thus far through a single hit from an enemy. Unlike modern games with safety-net save points, Mario had only one chance to make it to World 8 and save the Princess. He also had no way to lock in his growth as a character. No, I don't mean the metaphysical truths that he had come to understand over the course of his journey. Taking damage in Mario Brothers not only put Mario one step closer to death, but made him considerably weaker. Regular Mario lacked Super Mario's ability to break blocks, as well as Fire Mario's ability to toss magma at the passively homicidal turtles in his path.

So as a young gamer, I can recall physically jerking the controller in an attempt to avoid impending contact with a Goomba. My uncle would shout “left!”, and I would actually move the controller to the left – this was in the days before motion sensing, so naturally this accomplished nothing short of yanking the controller plug out of the system.

Why was I so terrified of taking damage? Why could a few pixels coming into contact elicit such a strong reaction? I think the answer is temporal: I didn't have all night. At some point, I would have to turn off the NES and go home, until next month when I needed another hair cut. And when the red light on the front of the console switched off, all of Mario's progress was lost, irrevocably.

The magic of Super Mario Brothers lies in its ability to push the player inexorably along the path to the finish. Mario must move forward, never back, and any kind of progress might be undone at any time. The player always comes back for more, not only out of a stubborn desire to overcome the many pitfalls of the game, but also to seek out the secrets strewn throughout – invisible treasures, hidden passages to new worlds, vines sprouting into the clouds.

Every adventure into Super Mario Brothers plays out differently than those that came before. There came a time when I began to discover secrets my uncle had never managed to unearth – and there will come a time when my children can teach me something about a game I first played twenty years ago.