Super Mario Bros.

From Mariopedia

Super Mario Bros. is one of the earliest Mario games to be made. It was originally released of the Famicon (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

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 Famicon 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 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.