Super Mario Bros. (1985): The History and Legacy of a Landmark Game
How Super Mario Bros. came together in 1985: Mario's arcade roots, Miyamoto and Tezuka's design, World 1-1 as a tutorial, Koji Kondo's music and its legacy.
Few opening screens are as recognizable as World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros.: a blue sky, a small figure in red, a row of blocks and a mushroom-shaped enemy walking slowly toward you. Released for the Famicom in Japan in September 1985 and soon afterwards on the NES, the game became the defining title of its console, one of the best-selling games ever made, and a blueprint for side-scrolling platformers.
This article traces how Super Mario Bros. came together, from Mario’s arcade origins to the design ideas behind the first level and Koji Kondo’s music, and explains why its influence is still felt.
Mario Before Super Mario
Mario did not begin life as a plumber, or even with his famous name. He first appeared as the player character in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong. He was unnamed in the Japanese release and called “Jumpman” in English materials, a carpenter trying to rescue a woman from a giant ape on a construction site.
His look came from technical limits. Arcade hardware could only show a small number of pixels for a character, so the designers used shortcuts:
- A cap avoided the need to draw and animate hair.
- A big nose and mustache suggested a face without needing a detailed mouth or expressions.
- Overalls in a contrasting color made his arm movements easy to read on screen.
The character took the name Mario in the West, after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo of America’s warehouse. The popular story says the name was a jab after Segale confronted Nintendo staff over late rent; others involved have told a different version, so treat the rent anecdote with caution. In the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros., Mario became a plumber, gained his brother Luigi and moved into the pipes beneath a city, setting up much of the imagery that Super Mario Bros. would use.
Building Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, with programming led by Toshihiko Nakago of the Nintendo partner studio SRD. Development began in the fall of 1984. According to the game’s development history, Tezuka suggested building it around Mario after seeing how well Mario Bros. had sold.
Miyamoto wanted to make a colorful “athletic game” with a scrolling world and larger characters than earlier Famicom platformers. The team reused and adapted the smooth horizontal scrolling technology from Excitebike, which let Mario run across levels much wider than a single screen.
Everything had to fit into a very small cartridge: 32 kilobytes of program code and data and 8 kilobytes of graphics. That constraint produced some famous efficiencies. The clouds and the bushes are the same graphic in different colors, and the Goomba’s walking animation is a single image flipped back and forth.
One of the key design questions was how Mario should grow stronger. The team settled on a mushroom that changes Mario’s size, drawing on Japanese folktales about magical mushrooms, which is also where the “Mushroom Kingdom” got its name. Small Mario and Super Mario made damage and progress instantly visible: getting hit shrank Mario back down instead of ending the game.
World 1-1: A Tutorial Without Words
World 1-1 is often held up as one of the best-designed opening levels in gaming, because it teaches the game without a single line of instruction. Miyamoto has said he wanted players to “gradually and naturally understand what they’re doing,” and the level’s layout reflects that.
Designers and critics commonly point to several lessons hidden in the first few screens:
- Space to the right. Mario starts on the left side of the screen with open space ahead, signaling that the game moves to the right.
- The first Goomba. A slow enemy walks toward you almost immediately. Touching it costs a life, and players quickly learn to jump over or onto it.
- The flashing question block. Its animation invites players to hit it from below, revealing that blocks can contain items.
- The first mushroom. The mushroom emerges, slides along the blocks and bounces back toward the player, so most first-timers touch it even if they are trying to avoid it, and discover that it helps rather than hurts.
- Escalation. Pipes of increasing height teach the difference between short and long jumps, and gaps teach that falling is fatal, all with low-stakes repetition before the challenge ramps up.
Analyses of the game describe this as teaching through repetition, iteration and escalation: show an idea safely, repeat it, then combine it with something new. That approach is still widely taught in level design today.
Secrets, Warp Zones and the Minus World
Part of the game’s appeal was the sense that its world held secrets. Hidden blocks contained extra lives, some pipes led to underground coin rooms, and climbing vines led up into the clouds. In World 1-2, players who ran along the top of the level discovered a hidden warp zone with pipes leading to Worlds 2, 3 and 4.
Secrets like these were passed around playgrounds and in magazines, which helped turn Super Mario Bros. into a shared cultural experience. The most famous glitch, the “Minus World,” is reached by a precise trick in World 1-2 and drops players into an endless water level labeled “World -1.” It cannot be completed in the NES version.
Koji Kondo’s Music
Koji Kondo joined Nintendo in 1984 as its first dedicated composer, and Super Mario Bros. made his reputation. He wrote the game’s score and its sound effects.
Kondo approached the music as something that should match the feeling of moving through the game. He drew on dance-oriented styles, including Latin rhythms, and wrote short loops designed to repeat many times without wearing on the listener. The result was the overworld theme, one of the most recognized pieces of music in the world. The underground, underwater and castle themes each set a distinct mood with very limited sound hardware, and the music speeds up when time is running out, adding urgency.
The Super Mario Bros. theme was later added to the US Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, the first piece of video game music to be included.
Release and the NES Launch
Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan on September 13, 1985. In North America, it is associated with the NES’s launch in late 1985, although the exact original US release date is debated, with some sources placing it later in 1985 or in early 1986. It reached Europe in May 1987.
Its role in the NES’s success is hard to overstate. When the console was being reintroduced to cautious American retailers, as covered in our history of the NES, it was Super Mario Bros. that gave people a reason to want one. From 1986, Nintendo bundled the game with the NES Control Deck, which put it into millions of homes.
Sales and Records
The original NES version sold about 40.24 million copies worldwide, according to the figures commonly cited, not counting later ports and re-releases. For years Guinness World Records listed it as the best-selling video game of all time, until Wii Sports overtook it in the late 2000s. Including ports and re-releases on later Nintendo systems, total sales are higher still.
Those numbers are partly a product of the bundle: many copies came with the console. But the bundle only worked because the game was good enough to sell the hardware.
The Sequels That Followed
In Japan, the follow-up released in 1986 for the Famicom Disk System was a much harder game using the same basic engine, with several of its stages first created for the arcade VS. Super Mario Bros. It did not come to the West in its original form at the time; it was later released internationally as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, and Western players received a quite different game under the Super Mario Bros. 2 name. That split is a useful reminder that “the same series” could mean different games depending on where you grew up. Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World then expanded on the original’s ideas with maps, more power-ups and more secrets.
Legacy: Why It Still Matters
Super Mario Bros. did not invent the platform game; Donkey Kong and others came first, and side-scrolling games existed before 1985. What it did was combine scrolling worlds, precise and responsive jumping, power-ups, secrets and memorable music into a package that set expectations for the entire genre.
Its influence shows up in several ways:
- Movement as the core. Mario’s momentum, acceleration and variable jump height made simply moving feel good, a principle many platformers still follow.
- Teaching through play. World 1-1 remains a standard reference for designers learning how to onboard players without text.
- Mascot-led design. A memorable character at the center of the game became something every console maker wanted, which helped drive the rivalry with Sega later.
- The console revival. The game is often credited with helping restore confidence in home video games in North America after the 1983 crash.
Decades later, Super Mario Bros. is still regularly re-released on new Nintendo hardware, studied by designers and played by people who were not born when it first came out. For a game built in 40 kilobytes, that is a remarkable legacy.
