“If you have Tetris fever, Dr. Mario is the cure!” That was Nintendo Power’s pitch in the summer of 1990. Nintendo’s falling-block game kept Tetris’s controls and gave the well a job to do. The well is a medicine bottle, the falling pieces are two-coloured vitamin capsules thrown in by Mario in a doctor’s coat, and the bottle is already full of viruses. Line up four of a colour and they vanish; clear every virus and the patient is cured. Nintendo released it for the Famicom and the Game Boy in Japan on the same day, 27 July 1990, and in North America that October.
Fast facts
- Developer: Nintendo R&D1, produced by Gunpei Yokoi.
- Music: Hirokazu Tanaka; the player picks a tune called Fever or one called Chill, or no music.
- Released: Famicom/NES and Game Boy, 1990.
- Players: one or two; the NES version is a split-screen race.
Four in a row
Nintendo Power explained the rules in its November 1990 feature. “A vertical column or horizontal row of four same-colored capsules and/or germs will disappear; problem solved. When the bottle is clear of germs, you’ll move on to the next emergency. If the capsules pile up to the top of the bottle, though, the patient’s a goner.” Capsules “move just like Tetris blocks”: the player slides them left and right, drops them faster and turns them with the A and B buttons.
Each capsule is two halves, and the halves can be a colour each. That is what makes the game different from Tetris. A half left behind when its partner is cleared drops down on its own, and falling colours can make another match or bury a virus under the wrong ones. Nintendo Power’s advice was to clear the highest viruses first to keep room to work, to look for horizontal as well as vertical matches, and to set up two or three matches with one capsule. Mean Machines put the arithmetic plainly: “It takes three blocks to destroy a single virus, or two to destroy two similar viruses stacked on top of each other.”
Before a game the player chooses a virus level, which sets how many viruses are in the bottle, and a speed of low, medium or high.
Two doctors
In the two-player game on the NES, both players race to clear their own bottles. Making two matches with one capsule sends two capsule halves dropping into the other player’s bottle, and three matches send three. “That could mess up anyone’s plans!”, Nintendo Power said. Each player can start with a different number of viruses, which lets a stronger player give a weaker one a head start. Of the games that changed one part of Tetris’s rules (see Falling Block), this was the one that gave the well a goal: where Tetris asked the player to survive, Dr. Mario asked them to finish.
Who made it
Dr. Mario came from Nintendo R&D1, the department that built the Game Boy, and Wireframe notes that its producer was Gunpei Yokoi. Hirokazu Tanaka, who had written the music for the Game Boy Tetris the year before, wrote its music. The team also hid a joke in it. Wireframe describes a secret ending that shows three of the game’s germs sitting in a tree at night while a glittering spacecraft, very like those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, beams them up and flies away.
How it was received
British reviewers judged it against the game it borrowed from. In Mean Machines’ review of the Game Boy version in February 1991, Matt Regan found it addictive but thought that anyone who already owned Tetris, as “virtually all Gameboy owners” did, would get “very little extra” from it. Julian Rignall disagreed: “a perfect Gameboy title” and “different enough from Tetris to warrant purchasing”. The magazine scored it 87%. Nintendo Power, ranking the month’s new releases in late 1990, gave its own publisher’s game scores between 3.3 and 4.1.
Later versions
Nintendo kept bringing the game back. Tetris & Dr. Mario put both games on one Super NES cartridge, with a Mixed Match mode that alternated between them; Nintendo Power reviewed it in March 1995. Dr. Mario 64 followed on the Nintendo 64 in April 2001, with Genyo Takeda as producer. Later versions included Dr. Mario Online Rx for the Wii’s download service (2008), Dr. Luigi for the Wii U (2013), Dr. Mario: Miracle Cure for the 3DS (2015) and Dr. Mario World for phones, released in 2019. Nintendo closed Dr. Mario World on 1 November 2021, and after that it could no longer be played.
Sources
- Nintendo Power issue 14, July 1990, p. 24: Summer CES preview (“a super puzzle game like Tetris”, “If you have Tetris fever, Dr. Mario is the cure!”, different starting virus counts for two players).
- Nintendo Power issue 18, November/December 1990, pp. 30–34: Dr. Mario feature (the rules, capsule control, virus level, speed and the Fever and Chill music, strategy, two-player doubles and triples). Same issue, p. 97: table of new releases with scores.
- Mean Machines issue 5, February 1991, p. 80: Game Boy review (87%; Matt Regan and Julian Rignall).
- Wireframe issue 69, December 2022, p. 97: the secret ending; R&D1 and Gunpei Yokoi as producer.
- Retro Gamer issue 114, 2013, p. 38: Genyo Takeda as producer of Dr. Mario 64.
- Nintendo Power issue 70, March 1995, pp. 64–65: Tetris & Dr. Mario review (Mixed Match).
- IGN Unplugged issue 1, April 2001, p. 7: Dr. Mario 64 release date, 9 April.
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary, volume 5 (2010, web): Hirokazu Tanaka as composer of Dr. Mario. https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/1/
- Wikipedia, “Dr. Mario” (web, secondary): Japanese and North American release dates; the later versions and their years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Mario
- “Nintendo’s Dr Mario World will shut down in November”, Video Games Chronicle, July 2021 (web, secondary): the end of service on 1 November 2021. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nintendos-dr-mario-world-will-shut-down-in-november