Christmas 1985 wasn’t supposed to be like other Christmasses we’d had as a family. It wasn’t because my dad suddenly came up with some crazy innovative idea – far from it. It was because my dad talked mum into letting him buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for our house.
Dad was a big fan of our ZX Spectrum – probably still is – but somehow getting a Nintendo was him pulling off a feat of diplomacy. He can negotiate peace treaties AND mow lawns.
I’d been banging on about getting a Nintendo for years and years, and had seen one at my friend Simon’s house. Simon’s always been one of those kids that’s first to own new technology – colour video recorder, microwave oven, you name it. His dad worked for the electric company or something and always got them first.
And now, here it is. This goddamn grey box turns our telly into whatever we want it to show. Mum and dad aren’tearly adopters – dad still listens to his 8-track tapes in his Ford Escort.
It sat under our kinda shabby artificial Christmas tree, wrapped in about as shiny cheap disposable plastic wrapper that Woolworths could provide. It’s just a big box with this Italian pipe dream of a plumber on the front in red overalls.
I’d never heard of Super Mario Brothers until I laid eyes on that box, but suddenly there was this overwhelming sense of…rightness. It just looked right. Like how games were supposed to look.
Getting it plugged in up our old Ferguson TV was painful enough, let alone playing it. We only got three channels back then and the horizontal hold was all-over-shitty besides. The remote control felt like it weighed about as much as a house brick. Dad fiddled around with the aerial lead for ages while bouncing off the walls like a baboon waiting for this box to do something.
When those crisp black pixels made up Nintendo’s logo on our drab grey telly, I knew we were playing with a new breed of animal.
Next up was the music. Everyone knows it. Hell, your nan knows it. But it vibrated around our living room and toyed with our sinus’s. It’s not even a complicated piece of music, but it burrowed its way into your brain like a stubborn parasite. My mum, who believes every video game sound effect is “someone killing a kitten with a spatula” even admitted it was catchy.
The onscreen title presents our moustached mute friend and dad duly hands me the controller. Feels like I’m holding the future in my hands.
Run. Jump. Kill my goofy-looking self on a floating carpet of lava because I failed to jump over that bastard gap. Awesome.
My younger bro Kevin was howling with laughter so much he nearly choked on his Quality Streets. “Oi! You’re meant to jump ON them, you berk”, he laughed as he tried to prise the controller out of my hands.
“No I’m not!” I yelled back, genuinely offended by this input he’d obviously had. But dad – absolute legend – told me I deserved another go. Respect.
Run. Jump. Make it past the pesky lava Gapigoomba thing and fall into a hole like a total tit. Third time lucky?
Got it! Found the Super Mushroom. MY GOD THIS IS LIKE MAGIC. Mario grows bigger, the music swells and FUCK I’M INVINCIBLE! !
It took me bloody ages to actually get to that stupid flagpole at the end of the level, but who cares – we cheered like our England had just won the bloody World Cup or something.
Instant addiction. I couldn’t get enough of it. Once I got home from school that day, I’d cleared it for DAYS. Raced home, dumped my rucksack in the kitchen where mum couldn’t see it, grabbed a handful of digestives and sat myself down in front of granny’s telly for hours. Mum tried to make me do my homework first, but only lasted three days before I figured out I could just tell her I didn’t have any. Sorry mum. Over a decade later, you must’ve spent that in lawyers’ fees by now.
One thing I loved about Super Mario Brothers when I was 10 was how everything in the game felt like it had weight. Mario felt like he had weight. Inertia. He moved so smoothly. Run towards a wall and he’d skid. Jump while running and you’d go further. Hold the jump button longer for a higher leap or a short hop. It was so obvious when you think about it, but compared to the chunky-whipsnake-thing movement you got with Spectrum games, it was revelatory.
Playing Super Mario Brothers taught me patience that I don’t think I knew anywhere else in my life. Every damn hole. God I hated those holes. And not proper holes – lava pits with holes in. One in particular that always got me was World 8-1. Just a simple jump between two platforms with a cheeky Koopa Troopa ambling about underneath.
I died so many times that dad – who was walking past with the washing basket – stopped to watch. “You’re trying too hard, son”, he said to me. Probably the single most valuable piece of gaming advice he ever gave me. “Keep running and jump”.
Fucking Dad. Obvs he was right. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.
Loads of secrets in Super Mario Bros. Secrets gave you such a feeling of achievement that modern games don’t understand. When I discovered that you could jump into certain bricks as Super Mario and they’d break to reveal hidden goodies, I felt like I’d won the understatement of the century award. Then there were Warp Pipes – green cylinders that transported you to other worlds within the game. Some of them were filled with bonus rooms chock full of coins, others transported you to secret areas high up that you’d never normally be able to reach. Secrets encouraged exploration and a questioning of “why does it have to be this way?” Apply that thinking to every facet of life and you’ll always grow as a person.
Hang on – there’s MORE secrets? Oh yes mam. Enter the world of warp zones my friends.
I’d heard rumours of them from another kid at school called Jamie (god him and his knowledge of game secrets). Jamie was always one step ahead when it came to knowing every cheat code and secret level nobody else knew about. He had like an import copy of Nintendo Power or some shit.
“You go over the…roof”- Jamie paused for dramatic effect, leaning in so that the other kids in our class suspended paddling to regurgitate his secrets – “in World 1-2, and there’s pipes that take you to the other worlds”
Buggerising foolpants. Over the fookin’ roof?! Isn’t he just making that up? Like how you can apparently unlock Ryu by hitting a secret button combo in Street Fighter II whilst hopping around on one leg? Mind you, by that night I’d done it.
At the end of World 1-2, if you run up a lift platform, kick-up off the ceiling of the level and run horizontally across the top of the screen, you find yourself in a secret room filled with pipes. They’re colour coded to Worlds 2,3 and 4.
Brain melted.
Far more mind-blowing than the warp zones, was the existence of The Minus World. Yep. Someone actually found a way to get your Marioboy into a level that doesn’t exist. Cue Jamie again, acting all mystical and shit.
“There’s this glitch level that you can get to from the warp zone area – if you do this wall clip trick…”
WTF was a wall clip trick, I thought. Nothing to do with moustaches clearly. Follow Jamie’s wall clipbananas instructions later that evening and after about ten deaths later I find myself falling endlessly into bottomless water.
Developers made games. Games weren’t mystical. They were made by fallible humans. Soon as I realised that, I was hooked on games forever.
How they managed to cram an entire game of this quality into the NES baffles me to this day. Thirty-two incredible levels fit into around forty kilobytes of program code. That’s…well it’s 0.00004GB. For reference, my phone photo album has pictures taking up thousands of times more memory than the entirety of Super Mario Brothers. Levels with unique enemy layouts, amazing challenges that use the architecture of the level itself as a playground and secrets upon secrets all fit into that tiny NES cartridge.
Super Mario Brothers wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the original arcade smash hit Mario Bros. Yes I played that too at our local Wimpy. Jumping and punching crooks. All in one screen. Super Mario Brothers took that sullen plumber and dropped him into a scrolling world of wonderment.
Flip book. Versus. A feature film.
Miyamoto taught me to let the game teach you how to play. Super Mario Brothers doesn’t shout from the rooftops about how to play it. No, it teaches you by careful consideration of its level design.
Take World 1-1 for example. It introduces new concepts – jumping, enemies, power-ups, where the fuck are the coins? – without needing to explain any of it. It places that first Goomba smack bang in your path so either you jump over it, or trip over it by mistake whilst learning to stomp enemies. It drops the first Super Mushroom right where you’ll walk into it without picking it up. See!? It TELLS you how to play. It doesn’t SHOW you. Everything in Super Mario Brothers is placed there deliberately to give you that feeling of discovery.
It wasn’t long before me and my mates started “speedrunning” it – let’s not get fancy and call it that – whoever could finish it the quickest would win. Warp zones became our best friend. I got it down to around 9 minutes once which I thought was better than them professional fucks who could do it in under 5 minutes.
Yeah I know, who cares? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. This laid the foundations of how I play everything now. Speedrunning the game made me optimise my route through the levels, take note of where every coin was hiding and play with near surgical precision. Learn skills that would help me type faster, drive safer, and complete tasks more efficiently in my career.
Got faster? Make your own challenges. See if you could beat it without using warp zones. Try it without collecting a single coin. Try it without losing a single hit. Bloody hard that last one – tried it many a time and failed.
My favourite challenge was to see how close to zero I could get. Ridiculously hard as you need to know how long every single section took you, right down to the timing of your jumps but I got it down to 3 seconds. Beatable.
Can’t praise Kondo enough either. He did wonders with what he had. THREE_channels to work with here guys. Most modern games have more resources than the ENTIRE NES but we don’t hear composers banging on about it. They didn’t need it. Super Mario’s main theme is so iconic that even your nan will recognise it. It has jokes. The underwater theme has a waltz feel to it that makes you feel weightless. The castle theme is so creepy it gives me goosebumps before I’ve even laid eyes on a Podoboo.
He understood that music sets the tone of a game.
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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