Most people in America met Super Mario Bros. 3 in a cinema. For Christmas 1989 Universal released The Wizard, a children’s film built around a video game competition. At its climax the announcer tells the finalists they will play a game nobody has seen, the curtains open on a wall of screens, and he shouts the title. David Sheff, in Game Over, called the film “a one-hundred-minute advertisement for Nintendo that millions of families paid to see”. Children watched Mario put on a raccoon tail and fly, and then waited months to play it themselves.
Japan had had the game for more than a year by then. Nintendo released it for the Famicom on 23 October 1988. When it did reach American shops, early in 1990, it sold more copies, Sheff wrote, than any video game before it.
Fast facts
- Developer: Nintendo, Kyoto.
- Credits: Shigeru Miyamoto, project head; Takashi Tezuka, “a director and planner”; Toshihiko Nakago, “coding director”; Koji Kondo, music (all as named by Nintendo Power in 1990).
- Released: Famicom, Japan, 23 October 1988; NES, United States, early 1990; Britain, late 1991.
- Hardware: an NES cartridge with Nintendo’s MMC3 memory controller.
- Sales: 7 million in the US and 4 million in Japan by 1993, according to Sheff; “around 17 million” by 2006, according to Retro Gamer.
A tail, not a centaur
Nintendo’s American magazine went to Kyoto to ask how the game was made, and in January 1990 it printed the answers. Each earlier Mario game had given him new power-ups, and the designers wanted another way for him to change. Their first ideas turned Mario into a creature; one that was rejected was a centaur, half man and half horse. They settled on a tail that let him fly. “I’m sorry to say there isn’t a funny story behind why we chose the Racoon tail,” Miyamoto said. “We thought the Racoon tail worked best from a practical point of view and it fit right in with Mario’s style.”
A leaf turns Mario into Raccoon Mario. At full running speed he can take off and fly for a short time, and the tail doubles as a whip for enemies and blocks. The rarer suits go further. The Tanooki suit adds the power to turn into a statue, the Frog suit lets him swim properly in the water levels, and the Hammer suit, taken from the Hammer Brothers, throws hammers and protects him from fire. A P-Wing lets him fly without stopping for a whole level.
The game introduced new enemies, too. Bowser’s seven children, the Koopalings, each guard a world. Miyamoto’s favourite was the Chain Chomp, a snapping ball on a chain, which he said came from a “bad experience” with a dog when he was young.
Eight worlds on a map
Instead of running from one level straight into the next, Mario walks across a map. Each of the eight worlds has its own, dotted with levels, fortresses guarded by Boom-Boom, Toad’s houses full of items and wandering Hammer Brothers. In each of the first seven worlds Mario boards an airship to chase down a Koopaling who has stolen a king’s magic wand and turned him into an animal; the eighth is Bowser’s own. The player keeps items won on the way and uses them on the map before a level.
The worlds differ sharply. An angry sun swoops down at Mario in just two levels. In World 4, the giant world, every enemy is bigger than he is. Retro Gamer noted in 2006 how many of the game’s ideas appear in only one or two levels: the green Goomba boot is in a single level of World 5, and the giant enemies on a single map. “It could be argued,” it wrote, that each world “contains a multitude of elements which another developer would simply have taken one of, to use as a gimmick and build an entire game around.”
Miyamoto told Nintendo Power that the plan was “to make it a game that players of all skill levels could enjoy”. The early worlds are full of coins and extra lives for beginners, while the later ones, the magazine said, “contain some of the toughest game play challenges of any video game”. Two players take turns, world by world, and the cartridge also holds a playable version of the arcade Mario Bros.
Secrets
The game hides three magic whistles, each of which takes Mario to a warp zone from which he can jump to a later world. One is near the end of World 1-3: crouch on a white block until Mario drops behind the scenery, then run to the end of the level behind it. Sheff wrote that finding such secrets meant going somewhere that “seems to be outside the game”. The Wizard showed a whistle being found. There is also a card-matching game that appears on the map after a high score, and a treasure ship that appears only if the player finishes a level with the timer, coin count and score lined up in a particular way.
What the NES had to do
The status panel at the bottom of the screen stays still while the level scrolls above it. In January 1991 Nintendo Power used the game to explain the chip behind that: “The scoreboard at the bottom of the picture is actually a second screen, which stays put even as Mario sprints from left to right. It’s made possible by a timer function that was specially built into the MMC3.” The chip’s small graphics banks also suit animated tiles, and the NESdev community gives the game’s question blocks, coins and conveyor belts as examples. Levels scroll sideways without limit but only two screens high, and the NES’s colour attribute grid leaves wrong colours at one edge of the screen during sideways scrolling; NESdev documents both.
The launch
Nintendo of America built a campaign around the game. Sheff describes how McDonald’s saw a preview and launched Mario Happy Meals, and how Universal’s president, Tom Pollack, needing a Christmas film after The Jetsons ran late, proposed The Wizard. Nintendo approved the script and the game footage. The film took $14 million at the box office, but Sheff wrote that “the groundswell of anticipation it created for ‘Super Mario Bros. 3’ was enormous”.
Nintendo Power covered the game in almost every issue of 1990: a visit to the designers in January, eight pages of maps and tips in March, and in June its first Strategy Guide, an 84-page issue devoted to this one game. In July the game was at number one in all three of its charts: the players’ vote, the pros’ picks and the dealers’ picks. Sheff reported that it went on to “outsell any video game in history” and gross more than $500 million. Nintendo’s lawyer Howard Lincoln used it as his example in the lawsuit against the Game Genie: “If you spend enormous time and effort to come up with ‘Super Mario 3’ and the player can get all the way through it, basically by cheating, then the challenge is gone.”
In Britain
British players waited until the autumn of 1991. In the United Kingdom McDonald’s ran a Super Mario Bros. 3 Happy Meal from 13 September, and Club Nintendo told its members the game would be in shops from November. Computer and Video Games gave it six pages in its November 1991 issue, “the biggest review ever to grace the pages of Britain’s best games mag”. Frank O’Connor wrote that it “makes Sonic the Hedgehog look like a wet Sunday morning” and told readers who did not own an NES to “go and buy one right now”.
After the NES
Nintendo brought the game back on the Super Nintendo in Super Mario All-Stars (1993), a collection Super Play guided its readers through that autumn, and again on the Game Boy Advance as Super Mario Advance 4 in 2003. Retro Gamer wrote in 2006 that some players regard it “even more fondly than Super Mario World”, and preferred its many items to that game’s four.
Sources
- Nintendo Power issue 10, January/February 1990, pp. 20–23, “The Making of Super Mario Bros. 3”: Miyamoto as “project head in charge of development”; the centaur and the raccoon tail; the Koopalings and the Chain Chomp; the plan for players of all skill levels and “some of the toughest game play challenges”; two-player turns; Tezuka, Nakago and Kondo.
- Nintendo Power issue 11, March/April 1990: eight-page review with maps of the first two worlds; the Frog, Tanooki and Hammer suits.
- Nintendo Power issue 12, May/June 1990: announcement of the first Strategy Guide. Issue 13 (Strategy Guide 1, 1990): “84 pages of maps, tactics and power plays”, the magic whistles, Toad’s houses and the card game.
- Nintendo Power issue 14, July/August 1990, p. 68: Top 30, number one in players’, pros’ and dealers’ picks.
- Nintendo Power issue 20, January 1991, p. 30: the scoreboard and the MMC3 timer.
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 1 (The Wizard as advertisement, $14 million, 7 million sold in the US and 4 million in Japan); chapter 3, “I, Mario” (the whistle “outside the game”); chapter 8 (McDonald’s, Tom Pollack, the script and footage approval, the “video Armageddon” scene, “outsell any video game in history”, more than $500 million); chapter 12 (Lincoln and the Game Genie).
- Retro Gamer issue 31, 2006, pp. 52–53, “The Classic Game: Super Mario Bros 3”, by John Szczepaniak: Miyamoto and Tezuka; ten additional items; the kings and wands; the sun in two levels, the giant world, the Goomba boot and single-use ideas; the white-block trick in World 1-3 and three whistles; The Wizard; the card game and treasure ship; “around 17 million copies”; Super Mario World.
- Computer and Video Games issue 120, November 1991, pp. 23–28: review by Frank O’Connor; the map, fortresses and Boom-Boom, the suits, the P-Wing, the card game and the playable Mario Bros.
- Club Nintendo (UK) volume 3 issue 5, 1991: preview; the McDonald’s Happy Meal from 13 September 1991; the game in shops from November.
- Famitsu.com, October 2025, and GAME Watch, October 2023 (web, in Japanese): the Famicom release on 23 October 1988; 3.84 million sold in Japan (GAME Watch). https://www.famitsu.com/article/202510/55573 and https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/kikaku/1540593.html
- NESdev Wiki, “CHR ROM vs. CHR RAM”, “Mirroring” and “Game bugs” (community reference, web, secondary): animated tiles through bank switching, scrolling limited to two screens vertically, and the attribute glitch. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Mirroring
- Super Play issue 12, October 1993: the Super Mario All Stars players’ guide, part two, covering Super Mario 3.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 169, August 2003: Super Mario Advance 4 “a remake of the classic Super Mario Bros. 3”.
- Wikipedia, “Super Mario Bros. 3” (web, secondary): the American release in February 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._3