Super Mario Bros.

Ta da, ta da da da, ta!’ With a little imagination you don’t see a baby typing here but the first few opening notes of a game that nearly every person recognises. Super Mario Bros., the first Mario platformer ever, has been played by nearly every gamer you can talk to these days.

I remember my first experience with it. It was my eight birthday, and I was expecting to get my very first console in my house, bought by the in my eyes never ending supply of cash held by my parents. The entire furniture holding the television was wrapped in present paper. That morning when I woke up, I hurried myself downstairs and ripped apart the paper to see the shiny grey machine standing under the television. ‘The Mintendo’, as my inexperienced brain named it, was finally mine.

The Nintendo Entertainment System, also known as the NES, was for many the first experience with the phenomenon called gaming. It came with a cartridge with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt on it. Ah, Duck Hunt. I could tell you stories about that game, but that’s not where this article is about.

Super Mario Bros. then. I played it to death. Literally because I can’t seem to start it up on my NES nowadays. Actually, my NES doesn’t start up any game anymore. Instead, it’s sitting in my ‘classic console cabin’ enjoying it’s old days on our planet. But last year I picked up Super Mario Bros. again, in the ‘Classic’ GameBoy Advance range, and since then I can’t stop playing it whenever I get the chance.

Especially in holidays or when I’m somewhere else, I’m playing the game like there’s no tomorrow, because on a handheld it’s the perfect time killer. It’s not really a challenging game. Although it gets a bit hard at the end, the control methods are so easy that’s it’s basically the perfect pick up and play game.

This past holiday I realised just how I have perfected my Super Mario Bros. skills. I know the secret pipes that bring you to levels deeper in the game, but I don’t use them because it requires no skill. Instead, I jump and run to the game like a maniac, knowing where to find all the 1 Ups, which paths are best to go to (should you take the pipe or run on in the outside world? Depends on where the most coins are really), and generally I’m just so fast and so good in it that I’m amazing myself with it.

You really get to know the game when you play it for thirteen years straight. Did you know, for example, that once you’ve hit a block that has multiple coins in it only once, an invisible timer runs which decides how many coins you can exactly extract from the block? If you’re perfect at jumping with Mario (which means you have to jump exactly when he hits the ground again), you can easily get at least fourteen coins out of a block. But jump wrong a couple of times and you could get as little as four.

Or what about this? If you hit enough enemies with a Koopa shield in one go (I think it’s about eight enemies, although I never really counted it), you get a 1 Up too. My head is littered with all these little facts that I just discovered in the progress of playing this game.

So in short, is Super Mario Bros. the perfect game? Untouchable? Well, depends on how you look at it really. At the one hand it IS perfect. Everything is right about the game, and no title ever bettered it. The balance is just unflawed. Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World are all extremely impressive efforts, but do they manage to combine the pick up and play feeling with such balanced gameplay that you can reach the ‘gamers euphoria’? No, I don’t think so.

The ‘gamers euphoria’ is a term I made up for a certain feeling. It’s a feeling you can also get at sports. Once you are so engrossed in a running competition, your brains seems to shut down and you just keep running without thinking, without feeling any pain or feeling tired. I sometimes have this with certain games. Goldeneye is a good example. Often I just played this on automatic pilot, not even realising I was playing this game in multiplayer, but still killing everyone in my sight.

But Super Mario Bros. is the one that makes you feel this in such excess that it’s frightening. Frightening because almost no game can do it. And you have to wonder: how does this game manage to do it? Did Miyamoto and co. added some sort of addictive eye-drugs in the game so that you went with the ‘flow’? I don’t have the answer, the only thing I have (and will have for the rest of my life) is that unstoppable and uncontrollable urge to play with a little fat Italian plumber called Mario, out to rescue some chick called ‘Peach’. It’s a story that these days most gamers would dismiss. With titles like Metal Gear Solid and God Of War excelling in the story-telling department, why does a game like Super Mario Bros. stand above them?

It’s the drugs, I tell you, it’s the drugs.

Written by Michel Musters (Moz La Punk) / Previously published on www.mozlapunk.net