No video game character is more Iconic than Mario. He defined a whole genre of video games. I guess it’s the best place to start at the beginning of probably the most enduring game series ever. Super Mario Bros. Is certainly not the first Mario game by far. It was preceded by Donkey Kong where he was known as Jumpman. After that, Mario and Luigi finally got their own game simply titled Mario Bros.

Enough history lessons. The story is simple. Princess Toadstool (Princess Peach in later games) gets kidnapped by Bowser, the king of all Koopas. It’s up to Mario and his younger Brother Luigi to run all over the Mushroom Kingdom to save the princess.

This game doesn’t have much in the way of special moves. You walk, run and jump. It doesn’t have many power ups. You have super mushrooms, fireflowers and invincibility stars. That is a recipe for FUN! By keeping the controls and gameplay simple, it makes the game fun because you don’t need to think of 100 things at once. The game has things to jump over like pits and other obstacles. It has a fairly large array of enemies.

I really like the warp zones. It’s a way to skip forward in the game. Before Contra had the infamous 30 lives code, Mario was able to cheat by skipping lots of levels.

The game was so successful that it was re-released several times on several different platforms.

• In 1986, it was re-released in the arcades.
• In 1993, it was part of a Super Mario collection on the Super NES, called Super Mario All Stars.
• In 1998, it was released for the Gameboy Color.
• 2004 saw the re-release on the Gameboy Advanced system.
• In 2006, it was one of the first Wii Virtual Console games.

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