Christmas 1985 was meant to be different in my house. I say that not due to any big ideas, but because my dad had managed to talk my mum into letting him buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). As someone who thought our ZX Spectrum was “just fine” for a household computer, this was a major accomplishment on Dad’s part. It also indicates that my dad is a man who is capable of negotiating a treaty, as well as being able to install a new lawn mower.
I’d been going on about the Nintendo since I saw one at my friend Simon’s house. He has always been lucky, with his family usually being the first to own new technology — first video recorder on the block, first microwave, etc. Now this grey box lets you control what happens on the TV. My parents are not early adopters, Dad still uses an eight track in his Ford Escort.
It was sitting under the slightly wonky artificial tree, wrapped in paper obviously taken from the discount shelf at Woolworths. The box art featured this Italian plumber dressed in red overalls, although I hadn’t heard of Super Mario Brothers prior to seeing the box, there was something about it that seemed… right. It looked professional. Like a real game should look.
Setting it up on our old Ferguson TV was a mission in itself. We only had three channels, the horizontal hold was dodgy and the remote control was as large as a house brick. Dad spent twenty minutes fiddling with the aerial lead while I was bouncing around the room like a madman, eager to see if this thing actually worked. When the Nintendo logo popped up on the screen, clear and bright, unlike the dullness of our Spectrum games, I knew we were entering a different class of game altogether.
The music then followed. That famous tune — you know the one, everybody knows the one — shook our living room. A simple melody, yet it lodged itself firmly in your head. Even my mum, who thought that all video game music sounded like “somebody strangling a cat with a robot”, had to admit it was catchy. The title screen displayed our moustachioed hero, and when Dad handed me the controller, I felt like I was grasping the future.
My first attempt was an absolute disaster. I died on the first Goomba — that little brown mushroom creature that just walks in a straight line. My younger brother Kevin laughed so hard he almost choked on his Quality Street. “You’re supposed to jump ON them, you muppet,” he helpfully pointed out while attempting to steal the controller. But Dad, in a rare instance of true parental guidance, told me I deserved another try. Well done to him.
Second attempt: I managed to pass the first Goomba, but I promptly fell into the first pit like a complete idiot. Third attempt: I discovered the Super Mushroom. It was like watching magic happen. Mario doubles in size, the music changes and suddenly I feel invincible. It took me around six attempts to reach that flagpole, but when I did, the whole family cheered as if England had just won the World Cup.
My obsession began immediately and I showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. Every day after school, I’d sprint home, dump my rucksack wherever my mum wouldn’t notice it, grab a handful of digestives and plant myself in front of the Ferguson TV for hours. Mum attempted to establish a “homework first” policy, but she managed to enforce it for only three days before I worked out I could simply deny I had any homework. Sorry, Mum. I’m sure the statute of limitations has expired on that by now.
One of the things that I noticed about Super Mario Bros at age 10, was how perfectly everything was controlled. Mario had mass — it was like he had real momentum, and he moved smoothly. If you ran and stopped, he’d slide a bit. If you jumped while running, you’d travel farther. Whether you take a small hop or a huge leap depends on how long you press the button. Sounds obvious now, but compared to the stiff, jerky movements of most Spectrum games, this was revolutionary. It felt like I was actually controlling a character rather than moving pixels around.
Super Mario Bros taught me patience that I don’t think I had in any other area of my life. One of the gaps I found particularly annoying was the one in World 8-1 — it was a simple jump between two platforms with a Koopa Troopa patrolling the area. I failed it so many times that Dad, who was walking past with a basket of laundry, actually stopped to watch. “You’re thinking too much, lad,” he said, which was probably the most insightful piece of gaming advice he ever gave. “Just run and jump.” Of course he was right. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one.
There were plenty of secrets hidden within Super Mario Bros, and this created an incredible feeling of discovery that modern games, with their large waypoints and objectives lists, cannot replicate. The first time I stumbled upon the fact that certain bricks could be destroyed by jumping into them as Super Mario, I felt like I had unlocked a secret code. Then there were the warp pipes — green tubes that sent you to other areas of the game. Some contained bonus rooms filled with coins. Others sent you to high places that you could never normally reach. The game encouraged you to experiment and try new things, which helped teach me to question the obvious limits of any system.
And then there were the warp zones. Oh boy, the warp zones. I first heard about them from this kid at school named Jamie, who always knew the secrets of every game long before anyone else. He had an imported copy of Nintendo Power or something. “If you go above the ceiling in World 1-2,” he whispered during recess time like he was sharing government secrets, “there are pipes that will send you directly to later worlds.”
Absolute rubbish, I thought. Above the ceiling? Sounds like one of those playground urban legends, such as how you can supposedly unlock Ryu in Street Fighter by performing some obscure button sequence while standing on one foot. However, that evening, my curiosity got the better of me. At the end of World 1-2, I found that I could jump onto a lift platform, jump above the ceiling of the level, and cross the top of the level to find a hidden room containing pipes labeled as warp zones to Worlds 2, 3 and 4.
Utter madness. My ten-year-old brain couldn’t fully comprehend it.
The existence of warp zones wasn’t just a nifty shortcut — it fundamentally altered how I viewed games. The rules weren’t set in stone like I had previously assumed. The developers had deliberately hidden these secrets for players to discover, thus creating an additional layer of gameplay beyond simply completing the game. After that, I began to try and break every game I played, searching for hidden pathways, unintended tricks, and secrets hiding just beneath the surface of the normal gameplay.
The Minus World glitch took this concept to an entirely new level. Once again, it was Jamie who broke the news — that if you performed this specific wall-clip trick in the same warp zone area as earlier, you could enter a strange, broken level called “World -1”. When I finally managed to pull it off after countless attempts, I found myself in an underwater level that looped endlessly, and I felt as though I had caught a glimpse behind the curtains of game development. This was not an intended secret — it was a genuine programming error, a glimpse into the chaotic, human process of developing games.
The sheer technical brilliance of fitting the entirety of Super Mario Bros into the NES hardware is impressive even today. All 32 unique levels of the game, along with their various enemy patterns, architecture-based challenges and secrets, were squeezed into a mere 40 KB of program code — approximately 0.00004 GB. In comparison, a single photo on my mobile phone is often thousands of times larger. Within the tiny confines of that amount of memory, Shigeru Miyamoto and his team created an entire universe of mushroom people, walking turtles, and angry sentient bullets using nothing but pixels that could be counted by hand.
The differences between the original Mario Bros arcade game and Super Mario Bros are night and day. I had played the original arcade version at our local Wimpy and it was simply a single-screen game in which Mario and Luigi knock-over and kick-enemies. Good fun, but limited. Super Mario Bros took that character and dumped him into a scrolling world of limitless imagination and variety. Like comparing a flipbook to a real movie.
Miyamoto’s design philosophy was evident throughout every element of the game. Instead of providing tutorial levels, Super Mario Bros teaches you through its level design alone. World 1-1 remains a masterclass in this style of design — it introduces the player to jumping, enemies, power-ups, pipes and blocks without any form of instruction. That first Goomba is placed in a position that most players will either jump over it or fall onto it by accident, thereby teaching the player the basic stomp mechanism. The first mushroom is positioned to nearly walk into you, therefore ensuring that you will obtain it even if you are trying to avoid the stupid thing. These were not random decisions — they were deliberate attempts to provide the player with an experiential method of learning, rather than through the use of explanation.
My speedrunning attempts commenced fairly early, although we did not call it that back then. Me and my friends would compete against each other to see who could complete the game the fastest, using the warp zones. My personal best was approximately nine minutes, and felt like winning the lottery, until many years later when I discovered that professionals could complete the game in under five. However, the competition to see who could complete the game the fastest taught me to optimize, to find the optimal route, to perform with precision. Every second counted, every button press needed to be perfect. Did not realise it at the time, but this was building skills that I would later apply to everything from typing to driving to problem solving in the workplace.
When I improved, I began to set my own silly challenges. Complete the game without using warp zones. Complete the game without collecting any coins. Complete the game without taking any damage — managed to do neither of these. My favorite challenge was to see how close to zero seconds I could complete the game with. Surprisingly difficult challenge that required knowing exactly how long each section of the game took. Completing the game with only three seconds remaining, my heart racing like I had just completed a marathon.
Koji Kondo’s soundtrack warrants particular attention. He achieved far more with the three channels available on the NES than most modern games achieve with full orchestras. The main theme is so recognizable that people who have never touched a controller recognise it instantly. The underwater theme has a waltz-like quality to it and creates perfect buoyancy. The castle theme makes my palms sweat even before I have seen a Podoboo. Kondo understood that music is not just background noise — it is integral to the emotional experience of a game.
Over the years, my relationship with Super Mario Bros has developed. I was initially confused by the different gameplay elements in Super Mario Bros 2. Picking up enemies, rather than stomping them? Learned later that it had originally been a totally different game in Japan, with the Mario brothers retro-fitted into the existing game for Western markets. Super Mario Bros 3 amazed me once again with its world map, power-up suits and seemingly infinite variety. Nevertheless, I have always returned to the original. There is a purity to it — a perfect blend of simplicity and depth that later versions of the game have not been able to recreate.
Eventually my original NES wore out — too many cartridge insertions, too many attempts to blow dust off the contacts. Mum suggested it may be time to “try other hobbies” — i.e., “get outdoors a bit, you pale git” — but I naturally saved up for a replacement. By that point, the SNES was already released, but I still wanted to play the game that started it all.
In university, I took my NES to the halls, and it became a focal point for social interaction. People who had never played classic Nintendo were bewildered by the crude graphics, but were rapidly addicted to the gameplay. My flatmate Andy, a non-gamer who mostly concentrated on his engineering studies, progressed from ridiculing my “childish toy” to staying up until three AM trying to complete World 8-4. “This game is crazy,” he muttered repeatedly, dying to Bowser’s hammers for the twentieth time. “Just one more go.”
The influence that Super Mario Bros had on my gaming career is incalculable, in reality.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
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