MARIO REVIEWED: Mario Bros. (NES)

In this series of posts that I'm doing because I literally cannot contain my excitement for Super Mario Galaxy 2, I'll be looking back at the games in the Mario franchise. I'm primarily going to be concentrating on games in the main series, but there might be a couple of detours along the way, too.

The history of Mario as a character is legendary. Originally conceived of as a character from Popeye, Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of the Mario games (and videogaming, pretty much), couldn't get the rights to it. And thank God, because we instead got one of the most lasting and iconic characters in pop culture.

Miyamoto needed a character to go up against Donkey Kong in one of his first Arcade games, Donkey Kong. That game is legendary on its own merits, but few people realize that the guy who is hopping up the platforms wasn't really Mario as we think of him today – he was Jumpman, Miyamoto's stand-in for Popeye. Jumpman was a name that only kind of stuck in Japan though, as the name "Mario" was used in all other parts of the world. The legend goes that Mario was named after the Italian landlord of the Nintendo building, who burst in and demanded a rent cheque in the midst of some serious programming. The rest, as they say, is history.

As a history lesson, the first game to star Mario (and introduce Luigi for the first time) is fascinating. I know that when I think of Nintendo, the first images that pop into my mind aren't necessarily of arcade machines – to most people, Nintendo exists first and foremost as the company that introduced the NES (or Famicom, in Japan) and not as the company that's been around for over 100 years, selling toys and briefly being involved in the seedy business of Love Hotels.

Mario Bros. is best viewed through an historical lens, as the core gameplay actually kind of sucks. This is the first game to introduce a lot of the iconography of the Mario series – turtles, POW blocks, tubes, running, jumping. The game supposedly takes place in the sewers of New York City, and is the first time that Mario is referred to as a plumber and not as a carpenter. And it's also the first real glimpse we have of what Mario would eventually become – running, jumping, kicking turtle shells, not to mention the actual, detailed version of Mario and Luigi that would inform their appearance for years to come (even if their appearance somewhat significantly changes for their next NES outing).

Mario Bros. arrived in arcades to probably greater acclaim than on the NES, as the NES controller simply can't handle the finesse that an arcade stick would have provided. For a series so renowned for its incredibly tight control, Mario Bros. is surprisingly janky, especially if you've just come off a marathon session of New Super Mario Bros. Wii or something. And the core gameplay conceit – defeating all of the enemies on the screen – gets really boring really quickly. That is, in single player. With a second player, the game is quite a bit more fun, as there's an element of competition. In terms of arcade classics, well, this one isn't really one of them.

Don't get me wrong, Mario Bros. is totally competent, and it's an interesting thing to look at if you're interested in tracking the progression of videogame series. I can't imagine anyone back in the early 80s expecting that Mario Bros. would ever lead to the dazzling heights that Mario has soared to these days, but we should all be glad that it did, and that this is where it started.