Super Mario Bros. celebrated its 25th anniversary almost two years ago, and this coming weekend will see the launch of the latest chapter of the Mario saga, New Super Mario Bros. 2. Depending on how you want to numerate the series, it's either the 11th, 32nd, or 200-something Mario game since Super Mario Bros. defined the workings of the 2D platform back in 1985. Any way you look at it, that's a lot of Mario.
Super Mario Bros. had a profound impact on video games. Any popular game sees its share of imitators; a truly great game creates its own genre. Super Mario Bros. didn't so much invent a genre as it defined how every action game to follow would play. It wasn't the first platform, but everything it did hit just the right notes in ways that nothing that had come before it had ever accomplished. From the perfect physics of Mario's jump, to the incredible syncopation of its music and sound effects, to the gut-level satisfaction of simply snagging coins, everything about Super Mario Bros. was basically perfect. It's not even that Mario himself was intrinsically great; his previous outings Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. had been fun games, but the depth and precision of Super Mario Bros. utterly eclipsed them on every possible level. In retrospect, they resemble rough sketches next to the fully realized masterpiece that is Super Mario Bros.
Maybe that's why Mario's 11th (or 32nd, or 200-something) outing doesn't stray too terribly far from the 1985 original. New Super Mario Bros. 2 may cling a little too closely to Mario games that that have come before, it's true, but the fact that it can iterate on a 27-year-old game and still be incredibly fun speaks volumes about the excellence of that vintage creation.
This week, 1UP will be looking back at Super Mario Bros.: What made it great, what makes it memorable, and how games got from there to where they are now. We'll also be looking at Mario's sequels to a lesser degree, but by and large the focus of our Super Mario Bros. Legacy cover story is the original game itself. So snuggle up in your Tanooki Suit and dig in for an in-depth exploration of one of the most important games of all time: Super Mario Bros. -- Jeremy Parish
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