Super Mario Bros.
From Mariopedia
- This article is about the NES game; for the series see Super Mario Bros. series
Super Mario Bros. is one of the earliest Mario games to be made. It was originally released on the Famicom (the Japanese name for the Nintendo Entertainment System) on 13 September 1985.
The game is a side-scrolling platformer that is often quoted to have saved the games industry in the USA single-handedly.
Mario and Luigi are on a quest to defeat Bowser, King of the Koopas and save Princess Toadstool. Currently, over 40.24 million households worldwide has this game. This makes it the biggest-selling videogame of all time.
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[edit] Gameplay
Super Mario Bros. is divided into eight worlds, which each have four levels. Mario has to get to the end of the level by jumping over various gaps and avoiding the enemies on his way. Mario can use several platforms, (which sometimes fall down when Mario hits them), stairs in the level, as well as Jumping Boards. There are also pipes along the way, some of which Mario can enter to visit various coin rooms before returning to the level, a bit further ahead than when he left. In Super Mario Bros., Mario has access to power-ups such as Mushrooms, Fire Flowers and Starmen. Mushrooms make Mario grow in size and enable him to take an extra hit. Fire Flowers allow Mario to shoot fireballs, which act like projectiles that can destroy most enemies. Starmen are rare, but gives Mario temporary invincibility which allows him to destroy any enemy at sight for a short period of time. Starmen will not protect Mario from bottomless pits however.
[edit] Story
One day, King Bowser, the great and powerful leader of the militaristic Koopa army, invades the peaceful Mushroom Kingdom. He and his Koopa Troop were jealous of the beautiful kingdom, and King Bowser decided to take it for himself. To do this, Bowser casts an evil spell upon the kingdom and transforms all of its inhabitants into blocks, weeds, and other odd objects. It is foretold that only the Princess Toadstool can undo the spell, so Bowser kidnaps her. Fortunately, the heroic Mario Bros. get wind of the Mushroom Kingdom's plight and race to its rescue.
The player takes the role of Mario, or in the case of a second player, Luigi. The ultimate objective is to race through the worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom, evade or eliminate Bowser's forces, and save the Princess.
[edit] Limitations
In 1991, Shigeru Miyamoto explained about the limitations in creating Mario: "We had to work under technical constraints including the number of pixels and number of colours the Famicom can display. There are many reasons why we drew him the way we did. We gave him a moustache rather than a mouth because that showed up better. We gave him a hat rather than hair because that looked better, too. Mario wears overalls because that shows the movement of his arms, and he's wearing white gloves because the white contrasts better with the coloured backgrounds. These are the technical reasons we made him look the way he does."
Due to the limitations of memory, Luigi is actually a palette swap of the Mario sprite. This means that there wasn't any need for all those new frames of animation.
[edit] Enemies
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