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Nintendo
Not a lot came out this week to draw inspiration from, so it’s time to do the Fascinating Facts thing with a game I know people will always be interested in no matter what week it is — Super Mario Bros.
Do I really need to explain what Super Mario Bros. is? It was the most popular game of all time for over 20-years (until Nintendo topped themselves with Wii Sports). The game inspired literally hundreds of imitators, and nearly every aspect of it, from its music, to its backgrounds, enemies and items have become iconic cultural symbols. Here are a few things you might not know about the game that changed the world…
1) Super Mario Bros. was supposed to be Nintendo’s grand farewell to the NES. Wait, what? Wasn’t Super Mario Bros. the first major NES game? Well, it was in North America. Nintendo’s Japanese 8-bit system, the Famicom, came out nearly two-and-a-half years before the American NES and by the time SMB came along, Nintendo was already planning to replace it with the Famicom Disk System, an upgraded Famicom that read games off rewritable floppy disks. America never got the Disk System, as Nintendo of America opted to stick with cartridges (most of the later, more advanced NES games like Zelda, Metroid and Castlevania were Famicom Disk System games in Japan).
So, basically the impetus behind the creation of Super Mario Bros. was to make one last epic game for the cartridge-based Famicom before Nintendo tossed it on the scrap heap in favor of the Famicom Disk System. Ironically the game that was supposed to be the Famicom’s send-off became the title that launched the NES’ successful run in America.
Nintendo
How the addiction began…
2) Jackie Chan indirectly influenced the game. Shigeru Miyamoto has mentioned numerous times that the game Kung-Fu was a major source of inspiration for Super Mario Bros. Arcade developer Irem created the original game, but Nintendo itself developed the NES port of Kung-Fu, a project Miyamoto and his team were deeply involved in. Kung-Fu’s smooth scrolling and bright colorful backgrounds set it apart from most games at the time, and got Miyamoto thinking about creating his own scrolling action game with colorful graphics.
Now, here’s where the Jackie Chan connection comes in. In America Kung-Fu just starred some random dork named Thomas, but in Japan it was actually a licensed game based on the Jackie Chan movie Spartan X (more commonly known in America as Wheels on Meals). So gaming’s most agile, jump-happy star was indirectly inspired by action movies’ most agile, jump-happy star. Appropriate really.
Golden Harvest
Mario needs to start punching more dudes in the face.
3) Super Mario Bros. didn’t star Mario initially. In 1985 Mario was a popular character, but he wasn’t Nintendo’s be-all, end-all yet. All Miyamoto and his team knew early on was that they wanted to make a big, scrolling action game, so initially they used a filler character…a blank square 16 pixels wide by 32 pixels high. Yup, Super Mario Bros. originally starred a featureless box.
Eventually SMB co-director Takashi Tezuka looked up the sales of the NES version of Mario Bros. (you know, the arcade game where you punch crabs) and found that, while it wasn’t a huge initial hit, it continued to sell solidly long after it was released. Based on this Tezuka suggested to Miyamoto that maybe Mario could replace the 16×32 square and Miyamoto was all, “Eh, sure, I guess that’s an improvement” and the rest was history.
4) Mario was originally going to ride a rocket and carry guns. Turns out our genteel moustachioed hero was originally going to be a bit more of a badass. It took a while for Nintendo to nail down chasm jumping and turtle crushing as the core tenants of Super Mario Bros. — initially the game was more of a straight-up action game, with Mario wielding a beam gun and a rifle. Also, the game was to be split evenly between on-foot stages and shooter stages in which Mario rides a rocket or cloud.
Nintendo
An early design document featuring cloud riding Mario.
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Watching that last video, all I could think was: “Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”
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“The sound of grabbing a mushroom and going down a pipe are also the same.”
No, they’re absolutely not. Did you even read the article that you provided a link to?
“I used the same sound for when he gets smaller and when he goes into pipes.”
Yeah, exactly. Oh well, missed one.
@AFMG That’s a pretty big miss. How does someone type that and think… Yeah. Yeah, they’re the same sound. Positive. No need to even question that.
I’d thank you for catching an error, but you had to go and be a dick about it, so no thanks for you.
@Nate Birch Sorry, but I had to call that one like I saw it.
Sounds like the shooter aspect stuck in their head and they finally put it in on Super Mario Land on Game Boy.
Except Mario Land was made by a totally different team — basically the Metroid team instead of the usual Mario team. But who knows, maybe the guys who made Mario Land were looking over Miyamoto’s shoulder and thought he should have stuck with the flying stuff.
Nate,
You forgot one of the most interesting facts about Super Mario Bros 1:
No one knows when it first released in North America.
[gamasutra.com]
also, not really related to super mario bros but a fun fact anyway, two porn parody’s called “super Hornio Bros” where made and they stared ron Jeremy. Nintendo bought the rights to both movies so they could never be released.
I truly hope Nintendo has an archive room for all the Mario products in their headquarters somewhere and have to do some awkward explaining every time somebody comes across the two Ron Jeremy pornos in there.
Here’s some SFW parts of it
[www.youtube.com]
It’s a glitch, but it’s a glitch you can perform in any regular version of the game, no hacking required. Basically you knock a turtle into a certain hole, and then it walks along under the ground and you can use it for an extra boost to get over the pole.
When ever i see that image of Iwata contemplating the banana I imagine he’s thinking about Ron Jeremy
16 was the only one I was aware of from playing SMB.
“Hmm, I’ll just wait for the right moment and OH GOD THEY’RE CHASING ME”
On # 19, it seems like the passage quoted from the directions is explicitly calling them mushroom people (who have been converted into rocks and bushes). Of course that would still leave the question of a human mushroom princess unanswered.
Mixed-race marriage and what not. Sensitive issues in Mushroom Kingdom. What with most of the population being turned into brincks and stuff, they feel they need to keep the lineage “clean”.
I don’t know… it sure seems like Mario’s doing a lot of moonwalking before the glitch happens. Seems like a Game Genie-created glitch or something of that nature.