Merry Birthday, Super Mario

So, it's been 30 years since Super Mario Bros. came out, and with that milestone comes a lot of reminiscing. Obviously now Mario is one of Nintendo's central franchises, but prior to 1985 not so much. There was the original Mario Brothers in arcades a couple of years prior, but for a young, impressionable lad of eight, I wasn't aware the thing existed. It wasn't until schoolmates all started yammering about some Nintendo Entertainment System that I became even remotely aware of this Mario fellow.

Looking back, it really is impressive to think just how much of a pull Super Mario Bros. had. It was a game that everyone wanted to play, and it even came packed in with the NES. Those are days long gone now where the only way a game comes with a console is for a specific promo deal. Looking back at the NES, it set the expectation for the time that consoles should come with at least one game. Nowadays, we'd have people moaning on Twitter or some such that they have to pay extra for a pack-in game that they don't want. "Why can't it be CoD or something, durr durr durr..." Back in the 80s, though, people were actually very happy to be getting Super Mario with their systems. There was a cheaper version of the console that didn't have a packed in game, but I never knew anyone who got that version of it. The game was just that much in demand.

This also makes me look back at other systems of the time and those to come later, as companies felt compelled to hop on board with the whole packed-in game trend. The Sega Master System in particular springs to mind, as I remember it coming with a few different games over its lifespan. During this time, Sega was still testing the waters in terms of what game should come with the console trying titles like Alex Kidd and Hang-On being packed with it at different times. It wasn't until Sonic the Hedgehog came along that we saw a lock for a Sega pack-in game, and even then it was pretty inconsistent with a lot of Genesis being sold without a game.

Nonetheless, Super Mario Bros. did set the expectation that console manufacturers should make some sort of effort to provide a version of their system that actually did come with a game, and so we saw this with Sega, then the TurboGrafx-16 did the same thing a la Keith Courage, and as handhelds slowly made their way on to the scene we got the likes of Tetris on the Gameboy and Columns on the Game Gear. So while Super Mario Bros. was a brilliant game in its own right, what Nintendo did with it also impacted game companies' business decisions in a fairly big way. I will acknowledge that Atari also packaged games with their systems, but it was never quite so front and center in people's psyche as what we saw happen with Super Mario.

From this game onward, it's become one of Nintendo's most important and enduring franchises. Whether it was Super Mario 2 and 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario Land, Mario 64, Galaxy, or whatever, this was the game where everything got started and made people really give a damn about Mario and Luigi. Yes there was Mario Brothers before this game came along, but it was no where near the phenomenon that Super Mario Bros. became.

Now here we are 30 years later, and people still really care about Mario. The franchise has managed to stay quite entertaining with folks eagerly snapping up new games when they come along. We've seen the rise and fall of a lot of other series since the time Super Mario came along. Look at Sonic, look at Crash Bandicoot, look at Pac-Man, we could make a list as long as our arm of games Super Mario and its successors had to lock horns with, and three decades on Mario is still king of the hill. Who would have thought all those years ago when Super Mario Bros. first came out that this would be the case?