Super Mario Bros. | Code Like It's 198x

The team that made Super Mario Bros. thought it would be their last big cartridge game. Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System was due the following year, and its disks held a megabit, far more than the cartridge they were working with. “I wanted to put in as much as possible that would make people think, ‘Nintendo sure does know cartridges!’ and ‘How did they do that?!’” Shigeru Miyamoto said in 2010. They fitted a scrolling world, secret rooms, warp pipes and a redesigned hero into 40 kilobytes, and had 20 bytes left over at the end. The game went on sale in Japan on 13 September 1985; four months later shops were putting up signs saying it had sold out.

Fast facts

Made by: Nintendo, in the development division Miyamoto had run since 1984.
Designers: Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, who drew all the levels between them.
Programming: Toshihiko Nakago and his team. Music: Koji Kondo.
Released: Famicom, Japan, 13 September 1985. NES, United States: public sources place it in the New York test market of late 1985. Britain, 1987, packed with Mattel’s basic NES set.
Size: 256 kilobits (32K) of program and data, 64 kilobits (8K) of graphics.
Sales: “almost six million” by mid-1987, according to CRASH; more than 40 million, according to Nintendo.

A plumber and his brother

Mario had been a carpenter in Donkey Kong. By the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. he was a plumber with a brother: Electronic Games reported in August 1983 that he had “become a plumber with his brother, Luigi”. David Sheff’s Game Over tells how the change came about: someone mentioned that Mario looked more like a plumber, so Miyamoto made him one. Super Mario Bros. kept the plumber and his brother, and plumbers work on pipes, so large green pipes became obstacles and doorways to secret places.

The game grew out of Mario Bros. (1983), Miyamoto’s arcade game with a black background and a screen that did not scroll. For the Famicom he wanted the opposite: a bright background, bigger characters and a screen that moved. The first test program was a square moving across a scrolling screen. Scrolling cost something. Two players could share a Mario Bros. screen, but not a moving one, so in Super Mario Bros. they take turns.

Miyamoto’s first written specification, dated February 1985, is odd to read now. In it the player pressed up on the D-pad to jump, and the A button was for attacking, with a rifle and a beam gun among the planned weapons. At one point Mario was going to ride a cloud and shoot from it. Within a week Miyamoto had drawn a planning sheet with a blue sky instead of a black one, and Nakago later said that was the moment the team knew they had something.

Everything they knew

Miyamoto called the result “a grand culmination” of Nintendo’s earlier games, and his specification said so. It listed refinements of Donkey Kong’s slopes, lifts, conveyor belts and ladders, Donkey Kong Jr.‘s ropes, logs and springs, and Mario Bros.’ enemies, frozen platforms and POW blocks. The characters twice the size of Mario Bros.’ came from Devil World. From Excitebike came the technique of scrolling only part of the screen, and the idea for warp zones: its arcade version let good players start at an advanced track. In Super Mario Bros. a skilled player could jump over the end of a level, find a hidden room full of pipes and skip whole worlds.

Much of the rest came from Miyamoto’s own life, as Sheff tells it. Near his flat in Kyoto there was a manhole cover set into a wall. He walked past it every day and never found out where it led. In the game, a pipe in the ground or a block in mid-air can lead somewhere nobody expected.

Drawing the levels

Every level was drawn on paper by Miyamoto or Tezuka, who had joined Nintendo as an artist shortly before. Tezuka described the routine to Satoru Iwata in 2010. He designed a level imagining how players would move through it, then showed it to Miyamoto, who would say things like “When an enemy appears here, the player will run this way, but we don’t want the player to hit Mario’s head on that.” The team could only see a working version of a map once a day, and there were no tools for trying out a change straight away, so a sloppy design wasted a day.

The first level is the best-known result. Mario starts on open ground, walking right, and the first thing to come at him is a Goomba, which dies when he lands on it. Iwata called it “always there for you in the beginning so you can keep stomping on it”. The first block marked with a question mark is just above. Hit from below, one of these blocks releases a mushroom that makes Mario twice the size; big Mario can break bricks and survive one hit. The game has no instructions on the screen. A player learns its rules by meeting them one at a time, in the order the designers chose.

40 kilobytes

The whole game had to fit in 32K of program and level data, plus 8K of graphics: the patterns for every tile and sprite. Miyamoto and his team treated that as a puzzle. The bushes on the ground and the clouds in the sky are the same shapes; the Famicom colours each part of the background from one of a few four-colour palettes, and swapping the palette turns a cloud into a bush. The small castle at the start of a level is the top of the big castle at the end. Nakago said the upper storey of the big castle has a door, “but we insist it’s a window!”

By the end they were counting bytes. Nakago told Iwata that a block cost two or three bytes, so twenty spare bytes meant ten more blocks, and Miyamoto kept asking for ten more. When Kondo wanted music for the ending, he said he could loop a tune in 40 bytes. That left 20 bytes, and Miyamoto used them for a crown, a reward for players who built up ten or more extra lives. Normally, he said, a team kept about 100 bytes back in case a bug needed fixing.

The screen itself uses one of the NES picture chip’s tricks. The score, coin count and timer stay still at the top while the world scrolls underneath. The program waits for the chip’s “sprite 0 hit” signal, which it has arranged to happen just below the status bar, and changes the scroll at that moment. The PPU entry explains how.

Sold out

In Japan it sold out. For Iwata’s 2010 interviews, Masayuki Uemura brought a photograph from the Asahi Graph of January 1986 showing a shop sign: “Super Mario Bros. and Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken are sold out. No further stock scheduled. Our apologies.” The same magazine ran a strategy guide for adults. Nintendo’s Hiroshi Imanishi said of the Famicom’s uncertain early years: “That one game blew away the uncertainty that had hovered up to that point.”

In America the game reached shops with the NES, which Nintendo test-marketed in New York from late 1985 and sold nationally in 1986. By 1988, Sheff notes, it was included with the console. N64 Magazine’s history of Nintendo put it plainly: Super Mario Bros. “was the game that sold the NES in the west”.

In Britain

British players met Mario in the arcades first. In March 1986 Computer and Video Games reported a coin-op Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo, and predicted that it “should be a great success and remain in the arcades for a long time”.

The home version arrived in the summer of 1987, when Mattel launched the NES in Britain. The basic set cost £129.99 with Super Mario Bros., soon cut to £99.99. CRASH and ZZAP!64 ran the same group review of the console, and it split the reviewers. Ciaran Brennan thought most of the software was “nothing more than variations of the Donkey Kong theme”. Julian Rignall disagreed: “The fiendishly addictive and incredibly playable Super Mario Brothers is a fine example – arcade perfect (flawless actually).” He called it the finest game he had ever played. In its first issue that October, ACE said the game was “almost worth buying the console just for this one game”, and pointed to its four million Japanese buyers.

Computer and Video Games printed a complete players’ guide to the NES game in September 1987. Owners of home computers got imitations. When CRASH reviewed the Spectrum version of Rainbow Arts’ The Great Giana Sisters in August 1988, it said “comparisons with Super Mario Bros are inevitable”, and US Gold withdrew the game after what ACE called “pressure from Nintendo who felt it looked a bit too much like Super Mario Brothers”.

Sales

The figures grew with the console. CRASH reported “almost six million copies to date” in July 1987, and ACE four million Japanese buyers three months later. By 2010 Nintendo said the original game had sold more than 40 million copies, many of them packed with the NES. Sheff counts eight Mario games produced by Miyamoto between 1985 and 1991, selling 60 to 70 million copies between them.

Sources

Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 6, August 1983, p. 91: Mario Bros., in which Mario has “become a plumber with his brother, Luigi”.
Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary (2010, web): Volume 1 (the release date); Volume 2, “NES & Mario”, pages 3–4 (Imanishi’s “blew away the uncertainty”, the Asahi Graph sold-out sign of January 1986); Volume 4 (the Goomba at the start); Volume 5, “Original Super Mario Developers”, with Miyamoto, Tezuka, Nakago and Kondo (the first specification of February 1985 and its jump button, the scrolling test and the move from Mario Bros., the elements taken from Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Mario Bros., Devil World and Excitebike, the blue sky, the “grand culmination” and “Nintendo sure does know cartridges!”, Excitebike and the warps, 256 kilobits and 64 kilobits against the Disk System’s megabit, Miyamoto and Tezuka drawing the levels, Tezuka’s method and once-a-day builds, clouds and bushes, the castle, Kondo’s 40-byte loop and the crown). https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/0/0/
David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 3, “I, Mario” (the plumber, the pipes, Luigi, the manhole, R&D4, the eight Mario games); the chapter on 1988 sales (the game included with the NES).
N64 Magazine issue 2, May 1997, Nintendo history feature: “the game that sold the NES in the west”.
Computer and Video Games issue 53, March 1986: the coin-op Super Mario Bros.
CRASH issue 42, July 1987, pp. 102–103: the NES review, with Brennan’s and Rignall’s opinions and “almost six million copies”; the same review in ZZAP!64 issue 27, July 1987, p. 52; Mattel’s launch advertisements in the same issues; the news pages of CRASH 42 report the price cut.
ACE issue 1, October 1987: console round-up and review of Super Mario Brothers, “almost worth buying the console just for this one game” and its 4,000,000 Japanese buyers.
Computer and Video Games issue 71, September 1987: “Super Mario Brothers — the complete players guide”.
CRASH issue 55, August 1988: review of The Great Giana Sisters for the Spectrum.
ACE issue 15, December 1988: US Gold’s withdrawal of The Great Giana Sisters.
NESdev Wiki, “PPU OAM” and “PPU registers” (community reference, web, secondary): the sprite 0 hit. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_OAM
Chris Gaylord, “Super Mario Bros. has sold how many copies?”, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 September 2010 (web, secondary): “Nintendo says the original Super Mario Bros. has sold more than 40 million copies.” https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2010/0914/Super-Mario-Bros.-has-sold-how-many-copies
Wikipedia, “Super Mario Bros.” (web, secondary): Toshihiko Nakago as programmer; the NES release in the New York test market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.