Waxing Nostalgic: The Super Mario Bros Trilogy

Waxing Nostalgic are posts where I talk about my personal experiences with the NES games I had growing up, and have completed prior to this challenge. Rather than critically review them, I’ll just nostalgically ramble about them instead. I hope you enjoy!

You know, for a Nintendo fansite, we don’t talk about Mario too much ’round these parts.

Part of the reason for that is I figure I’ve got exactly nothing to contribute to the NES era Super Mario Bros. discussion that hasn’t already been said. Critically, I mean. These are only some of the most successful and beloved video games ever committed to cartridge, is all. Every tiny aspect of these games has been thoroughly dissected, right down to the tiniest coding details no normal human being would notice. I replayed them recently – just the other day, in fact – and they’re still as fun as they ever were. I doubt that’ll ever change. So I’m just gonna ramble about each one and hope it’s mildly entertaining and/or cohesive by the end.

Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Picture it: Summer 1997. The concept of “video game collecting” was borderline non-existent, so the used market was the wild west. If you were paying more than $3 for an NES game – ANY NES game – you were overpaying. Hard to wrap your head around in this day and age, isn’t it? But because of this viewpoint, NES carts were seen as relatively worthless by most people…which is great news for a kid who just wants to play some games.

One fateful day in elementary school, my classmates and I were tasked with making a little art piece out of scrap metal; screws, cans, wires, anything you could get your hands on. That was the first time I ever used a glue gun, and the tips of my fingertips still sting when I think back on it. I distinctly remember watching my teacher pull out a Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge from the bag of scrap he’d brought into class, poised to roughly pry it open from the bottom of the cart with a screwdriver. I gasped in horror and told him to stop – instead of breaking a perfectly good video game, give it to me! I’ve got one of those dusty old Nintendo’s hooked up at home right now and I play it every day!

As it happens, he actually let me keep that SMB/Duck Hunt cart! I was over the moon, having been given a new game so unexpectedly, and I played the hell outta it that night. And the night after that. And every night. And every morning before school, too.

Even though I already had Mario 3, SMB gripped me in a way that a video game never had before. My older siblings all grew up playing it, so they were all thrilled to see a classic back in the house. My sister taught me how to find the secret warp on 1-2, which sparked a lifelong fascination with gaming secrets. The first time I had stayed up past midnight outside of New Years Eve was playing Mario. This is the NES game I have the absolute fondest memories of, and the one I would credit with truly kicking this silly little hobby into a full-on obsession, even three decades later. I wouldn’t consider myself a pro by any means, but I can still run through this game in 10~15 minutes no sweat.

I’ve got a big family, and within that family are more than a few younger nieces. These kids are part of the Roblox/TikTok/Skibidi toilet generation, so about as far removed from the NES as one could get. But when the NES Classic Edition was hooked up to the TV, you couldn’t keep them away from it. Any time they came over to visit, they’d beg to play it! They love Double Dragon II, and Mario 2 as well, but the one they kept coming back to was Super Mario Bros. Nearly 40 years on, that humble little game is still hooking its claws into kids. Picking it up and playing it brings a misty tear of nostalgia to my wizened old eye, even now. It’s simply timeless.

Sidebar: Figured I may as well touch a little on Duck Hunt while we’re in the neighbourhood. I played the hell out of it as a kid, having picked up a Zapper at a garage sale for a dollar near the end of that particular school year. I loved it; was totally fascinated that the TV could be interacted with in such a unique way. It’s fun to try and play it legit, squinting down the little sight and taking aim, and it’s fun to just jam the Zapper barrel right up to the screen and be a dirty cheat about it, too. Plenty of fun memories playing it with my older brother, and trying to get better at it on my own time, too. Not much in the way of depth, but a great distraction alongside SMB. They really didn’t miss with that combo cart.

Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988)

Super Mario Bros. 2 originally being some weird non-Mario game for the Famicom Disk System is a tale as old as time. Everyone on planet Earth with a passing interest in video games and an internet connection accrues this knowledge somewhere along the line. Like, when you sign up for your first ever email account online, you get sent a care package detailing stranger danger, sites of interest, and a little trivia section that touches on the fact that Nintendo thought the original Japanese Mario 2 would’ve been way too hard for Americans, resulting in the Mario 2 we ended up getting.

I never had this one growing up, but I sure wanted to. I saw it at a thrift shop back in the 90’s, likely for next to nothing…but I didn’t have any money, being a kid and all, and my dad refused to shell out the $2 or whatever it cost. Thanks to the cart slipping through my fingers, it felt like “the one that got away” for years to come. In some ways, it still does. The exact same scenario happened with a cartridge of Zelda II around the same time, interestingly enough. I ended up buying Mario 2 on the Wii’s Virtual Console years later (retro in and of itself now, augh), but never got too far into it. I was determined to finally play and finish Zelda II instead, and that took up most of my Wii gaming time back then. So again, it slipped through my fingers. I never ended up beating Zelda II, either. So it goes.

Fast forward allllll the way to 2019 or so, and I finally got to experience Mario 2, start to finish, via Super Mario All Stars on SNES. I liked it. I played it again, and liked it more. And I played it yet again on the NES, and liked it even more the third time. I’ve got no nostalgia for this particular game (childhood yearning aside), so there’s no rose tinted glasses obscuring my viewpoint when I tell you this is an excellent one.

The gameplay is rock solid, but I think it’s the bizarre worldview that really keeps me coming back for more. It’s Mario, but also decidedly not Mario. A strange dream world called Subcon(…scious? OH MY GOD) where one never truly knows what’s coming your way next. Vegetables are the ultimate weapon to vanquish evil, for Chrissakes. It’s totally unlike any other Mario game that came before or since, and thanks to that, it’s been labelled as the “black sheep” of the franchise. Some people tend to turn their noses up at it in retrospect, claiming it’s not a “real” Mario game due to the unorthodox history, but that’s not very fair. It was designed with a Mario flair, by the original Super Mario Bros. team, so the DNA is all there. I guess SMB is a hard act to follow, and to be followed by a game that’s often considered the greatest of all time in SMB 3 isn’t an easy position to be in, either.

Sometimes I wonder what sort of dark timeline we’d be living in if Nintendo decided to release SMB: The Lost Levels instead of SMB2. For those not in the know, the original Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2 (typically referred to in English as “The Lost Levels“) had borderline identical graphics to SMB 1, and was intentionally designed to be ridiculously, eye-wateringly hard. Imagine if instead of this strange little romp through dreamland, the North American video game market had to contend with Mario 1: Stupid Hard Edition. Would this fledgling industry have continued to grow in the way that it did throughout the late 80’s/early 90’s if kids the world over decided they’d had enough of Mario because his newest outing was way too tough? Would Nintendo have taken the public’s undoubtedly negative reception towards SMB: Lost Levels as disinterest in the Mario brand as a whole, and let that particular franchise die on the vine? If not for Super Mario Bros 2, we may be living in a world without Super Mario 64; without Mario Odyssey. At least in the way we know them today. That’s some scary stuff, and if only from that perspective alone, I’m eternally grateful that they decided to go with this odd little number instead. Never mind that it’s simply a good time.

Regardless of what overall public opinion of SMB2 is, it’ll always have a fan in me. Such a good, odd little game. I’ll definitely be dabbling in it for years to come.

Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)

And now we’re onto the big one. The cultural zeitgeist of not just the entire NES library, not just the Mario franchise, not just games of the 20th century, but video games as a whole. And you know it’s a good day when I actually get to use the word “zeitgeist.”

Super Mario Bros. 3 is Super Mario Bros. on all of the steroids. It’s good as hell. Not that you need me to tell you that. This is the first ever Mario Bros. game I had the privilege of playing back on my NES all those years ago. Super Mario Bros. 3, as I have mentioned more than once over the course of this post, is still regularly considered the greatest video games ever made. Not just of the 8-bit era, but of all video games, full-stop. Sayeth Wikipedia, only four games released in the 2020s have made this illustrious list so far. Not relevant to this particular discussion, but interesting, huh?

I get it. Mario 3 is magic. I love the variation of in this one; each of the eight worlds has its own strong identity and gameplay hooks that no other worlds in the game do. That level design is as tight as tight can be – and it better be, considering there’s a whopping 90 of them. I love that the stages aren’t terribly long, because nothing sucks more than a 2D platformer being padded for length. The amount of secret items and warps is downright crazy. Riding around in the Kuribo’s Shoe is pure, unfiltered joy. The world map, and having multiple paths laid out at your feet to tackle the game in the order you feel most comfortable with, is a crazy amount of depth for 1990. Hell, that depth still holds water today. Most AAA games aren’t made with replays in mind, these days. And the power-ups, oh, the power-ups! Raccoon Mario is still my favourite of the lot. I’ll never forget the level of awe I felt exploding its way into my little kid brain when I ran long enough to fill the bar and flew upward for the first time.

In the interest of research, I actually went out of my way to search for people who didn’t like Mario 3. There was very, very, very little in the way of folks who had bad things to say about it. One numpty tried to argue that Mario 3 hadn’t aged well because, and I quote, “it doesn’t have any save functionality.” This further proves my working theory that people who throw around the phrase “hasn’t aged well” have exactly zero idea of what the shit it is they’re talking about.

So anyway. Mario. My favourite of them all changes on a day-to-day basis. SMB is an all-time great, SMB2 is pure (if not somewhat bizarre) happiness in cart form, and SMB3 is a game that we should all be grateful to live in the same place and time as. I think, if some deranged person had a gun to my head and demanded I pick a favourite of the three, I’d go with the first one, with those mountains of warm fuzzy nostalgia pushing it juuust over the edge of SMB3 for me. But you really can’t go wrong with any of this trilogy. In fact, you should go and play them right now. Yes, right now! Go! Go now!