Mario Bros. | Code Like It's 198x

Mario Bros. is the game that turned the carpenter from Donkey Kong into a plumber, gave him a brother, and let two people play on the same screen at once. Shigeru Miyamoto said the idea came from someone else’s game. “There was a famous American game called Joust,” he recalled in 2000. “I said, let’s make a game like that! and I started working together with Yokoi on it.” Not everyone was convinced when it first appeared. Electronic Games called it “the weakest entry in Nintendo’s line”, and Electronic Fun played it 60 times at a trade show without getting past the first screen.

Fast facts

Maker: Nintendo. Miyamoto designed it, working with Gunpei Yokoi.
Released: arcades in 1983. Nintendo showed it at the Amusement Operators Expo in Chicago in the spring; the Famicom version followed in Japan on 9 September 1983.
Players: one or two, both on the screen at once.
Characters: Mario and his brother Luigi, against Shellcreepers (turtles), Sidesteppers (crabs) and Fighterflies.
Home versions: Atari 2600 and 5200 (from late 1983), Atari XL/XE (1989), Famicom and NES, and Ocean’s Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC conversions (1987).

A plumber and his brother

Miyamoto built the game backwards from the way its enemies die. The player cannot jump on them; he punches the floor from underneath, which knocks anything standing on it onto its back, and then kicks it away. “I was thinking about what kind of enemy would be weak to being knocked over from below like that,” Miyamoto said, “and then it came to me: ‘ah hah! turtles!’” Crabs and flies followed, and the only place he could think of where all three lived was an underground tunnel. That put the brothers among pipes, and the pipes solved a design problem too: an enemy that leaves through a pipe at the bottom of the screen comes back out of one at the top. The idea for them, Miyamoto said, came from a plastic pipe he saw sticking out of a wall in Kyoto.

The pipes changed Mario’s job. American magazines noticed straight away. In August 1983 Electronic Games reported that Mario “has obviously split from the carpenter’s union and become a plumber with his brother, Luigi”, and Atari Age told its readers that he “has given up the construction business and taken up plumbing”.

Luigi was there for the second player. “You mean the sprite we just color swapped?” Miyamoto said when asked about him; Yokoi, he explained, “wanted to make a game that would be easy for players to understand, which is how Luigi came about”. Video Games wrote in July 1983 that Luigi “makes his initial video game appearance” here. Nintendo also put both brothers into a Game & Watch handheld called Mario Bros. the same year, a different game in which they carry crates round a bottling plant, and public sources disagree about which of the two reached the shops first.

How it plays

The screen is a single room with four floors, two pipes at the top and a brick floor at the bottom. Video Games described the floors as “cushioned”, and Commodore User called them “rubbery”: a punch from below makes the floor above bulge up. Each creature needs its own approach:

Shellcreepers go over with one punch and can then be kicked off.
Sidesteppers need two. Atari Age liked the way the first punch only makes the crab angry: “It gets a furious look on its crabby little face and speeds up tremendously.”
Fighterflies hop, and can only be flipped when they land on a floor.
An ice creature in later rounds freezes the floors, and fireballs bounce across the screen.

A creature left on its back too long gets up again, changes colour and moves faster. Each one kicked off sends a coin out of a pipe for extra points, and every few rounds a bonus round asks the brothers to collect all the coins before time runs out. The POW block near the bottom of the screen is the emergency button: punch it from below and every creature on the floors flips over at once. It takes only three hits before it is used up.

With two players the brothers can help each other or get in each other’s way. Atari Age pictured them “working together to defeat the enemies or trying to knock off your brother at the same time”. Two players at once was still rare: Atari Age called it “one of those rare games where both players can be on screen at the same time”, though Williams’ Joust had done it a year earlier.

The floors are slippery, and that divided players. Video Games found the game “better than average for two-player action, but it’s also very difficult. The floor is so slippery that it’s extremely difficult to control Mario or Luigi.”

A doubtful start

The first reports from America were unkind. Reporting from the Amusement Operators Expo in Chicago, Video Games said the game “was consistently confusing to all those who tried it” and told readers not to “expect Mario Bros. to be another Donkey Kong”. Electronic Fun picked it as one of the show’s likely duds: it liked the humour (“when outside their shells, the turtles run around in very modest boxer shorts”) but “never got past the first screen—even after 60 free plays at the show”. Electronic Games dismissed it as “yet another in the seemingly endless parade of look-and-play-alike jumping games”.

Atari’s versions

In December 1983 Electronic Games reported that Nintendo had given Atari exclusive worldwide rights, outside Japan, to home video game and computer versions. The Atari 2600 cartridge came first, at the end of 1983. Videogaming Illustrated split over it: one reviewer missed “the big lug of a gorilla” and found “only mildly interesting gameplay”, while the other thought that at home, “where gameplay is virtually all the 2600 has to offer, Mario Brothers is one of the better buys”. The Atari 5200 version did better. Reviewing it in February 1985, Charles Ardai of Electronic Games called it “a nearly perfect copy of the arcade game in every way”, two-player mode included.

The version for Atari’s XL and XE computers did not appear until 1989, as a $24.95 cartridge. ANALOG Computing enjoyed it but asked the obvious question: with Nintendo already on Super Mario Bros. 2, “Why is it that Atari is a full five years behind the rest of the video game industry?”

In Japan, Hudson Soft converted Mario Bros. for home computers such as the NEC PC-88 and the Sharp X1, according to Wireframe.

Ocean’s conversions

British computer owners waited until 1987, when Ocean released Mario Bros. for the ZX Spectrum at £7.95 and for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC at £8.95. Its advertisements promised “Fireballs, Sidestepper, Fighterfly and of course - Mario and Luigi!”

The reviews were poor. CRASH gave the Spectrum version, programmed by Choice Software, 45% and called it a “lifeless conversion of a simple coin-op, the appeal of which lay in its cute characters”; one reviewer wrote that it “isn’t a patch on the arcade version”. Sinclair User called it “a real production-line Ocean conversion”, but admitted that it was “incredibly good fun, despite all whinging about its simplicity”. Zzap!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 55%, complaining that Mario kept running after the joystick was let go and that the characters had lost their charm: “Fun, but sadly not as playable as the original”. Commodore User’s reviewer enjoyed it more, but warned that anyone who knew the Nintendo coin-op would find that this version “doesn’t resemble it at all”.

Later life

Mario Bros. kept coming back. Super Mario Advance (2001) for the Game Boy Advance included an updated Mario Bros. Classic for up to four players, and in May 2004 Nintendo reissued the Famicom game in Japan in its Famicom Mini series for the Game Boy Advance. Two years after the arcade game, Super Mario Bros. took its enemies, frozen platforms and POW blocks and put them in a scrolling world, although that meant giving up two players on one screen.

Sources

Shigeru Miyamoto, interview in Game Maestro volume 1 (2000), translated by shmuplations (web, secondary): Joust and working with Yokoi; the turtles, crabs and flies; the underground tunnel and the pipe in Kyoto; Luigi as a colour swap. https://shmuplations.com/miyamoto2000/
Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 1 no. 10, July 1983: p. 49, Mark Brownstein’s report from the Amusement Operators Expo (“consistently confusing”, “another Donkey Kong”); pp. 56–57, “Coin Op Shop” review (Luigi’s “initial video game appearance”, the cushioned floors, the creatures, the POW used three times, the bonus rounds, “extremely difficult to control”).
Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, vol. 1 no. 9, July 1983, p. 26: show report, the turtles’ boxer shorts, 60 free plays.
Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 6, August 1983, p. 91: coin-op preview (“become a plumber with his brother, Luigi”, “the weakest entry in Nintendo’s line”).
Atari Age, vol. 2 no. 3, September/October 1983, p. 14: “Mario Bros. is coming” (taking up plumbing, the Sidestepper, two players on screen at once, due for Christmas).
Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 10, December 1983, p. 10: Atari’s exclusive worldwide rights outside Japan.
Videogaming Illustrated, November 1983: review of the Atari 2600 version.
Electronic Games, vol. 3 no. 2, February 1985, p. 69: Charles Ardai’s review of the Atari 5200 version.
Antic, vol. 7 no. 12, April 1989, p. 10: David Plotkin’s review of the XL/XE cartridge ($24.95).
ANALOG Computing issue 73, June 1989, p. 67: Matthew J. W. Ratcliff’s review of the XL/XE cartridge.
CRASH issue 41, June 1987: Ocean advertisement (prices); p. 26, review of the Spectrum version (Choice Software, £7.95, 45%).
Sinclair User issue 63, June 1987: review of the Spectrum version.
Zzap!64 issue 27, July 1987, pp. 24–25: review of the Commodore 64 version (£8.95 cassette, £12.95 disk, 55%).
Commodore User, June 1987, p. 40: Bill Scolding’s review of the Commodore 64 version (the “rubbery” ledges).
Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, Hudson Soft profile: Hudson’s conversions of Mario Bros. and Balloon Fight for Japanese computers.
Nintendo Power Advance issue 1, 2001: Super Mario Advance and Mario Bros. Classic.
Edge issue 137, June 2004: the second Famicom Mini series, including Mario Bros., on sale in Japan in May 2004.
Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary, Volume 5 (2010, web): what Super Mario Bros. took from Mario Bros., as set out in the Super Mario Bros. entry.
Famitsu.com, “On this day” feature, 9 September 2024 (web, secondary): the Famicom release date and the arcade game running from July 1983. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202409/16680
Wikipedia, “Mario Bros. (Game & Watch)” (web, secondary): the handheld’s release in March 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros._(Game_%26_Watch)