Geek Soap Box

It probably started off simply enough — after two relative disappointments in Donkey Kong 3 and Mario Bros., but with the quarter-sucking success of the original Donkey Kong merely a short memory away — Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto and his team got together to create a new game featuring the popular plumber from Brooklyn for the company’s Famicom Disk System.  What happened next forever changed the landscape of popular culture throughout the world.

Super Mario Bros. not only captivated a worldwide audience, it single-handedly ended the two-year drought brought on by the Video Game Crash of 1983 and made “Playing Nintendo” a branded verb to the same extent that “Google-ing” is now for searching the Web.  In the process, it also became the second best-selling game of all time (behind only recent phenomenon Wii Sports) and inspired legions of colorful platforming games to follow for decades.  Mario did it all, combining perfect physics (you can determine the strength and timing of your character’s movements based on how long you held buttons down), incredible music (you know the SBM theme by heart, admit it), innovative gameplay (large, scrolling worlds filled with varied environments, power-ups, Easter eggs, and puzzling labyrinths), and just enough complexity (Worlds 7-1 and 8-3, with their unending waves of hammer brothers, still give me nightmares).

Still, that being said, Miyamoto and company seriously had to be on some good shit when they planned this game out.  For starters, it takes place in a world of GIANT MUSHROOMS, some of which are large enough to walk on.  Other ‘shrooms grant our hero the ability to grow to twice his original size (thereby openly defying the First Law of Thermodynamics), while even others have grown FEET and a bad attitude and ominously and silently march towards you as infantry in a demented LSD army.  Then there are the giant, man-eating plants, walking turtles. tooth-like happy-face clouds, and water-soluble bouncing fireballs.  Dude, that’s just freaking weird.

Dude, that’s a giant mutant turtle king who throws hammers, has a spiky shell, and breathes freaking fire.

Is it the greatest game ever?  Well, it might be the most accessible, or the most played or popular, but “greatest” is a tough distinction to make when others have proven so capable of providing tens of hours of fully immersive, complex worlds utilizing the latest in modern technology.  Instead, let’s just call it what it is: the one that every other video game that followed it aspired to be.  And damn, if it didn’t fully recapture my interest and enthusiasm again so many years later on the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Official Geek Soap Box Score: 10 out of 10