Super Mario Turns 25

How Nintendo redefined everything before and after.

It's tempting to think of videogame history as a linear progression, generations of hardware and game ideas stacked on top of each other in a communal totem reaching perpetually upwards. The truth is much more random. Gaming history is better described as a series of moments where definitive concepts unexpectedly came into focus, clarifying years of structureless experimentation in the shapeless murk of time. There have been few other moments as transformative and energizing as the emergence of Mario, the mascot for the entire industry who turns 25 years-old in North America today. He seems as inevitable as bubble gum or Marilyn Monroe, but it was luck as much as anything that helped him reshape the idea of a videogame and, in all likelihood, saved the industry from years of fumbling decline.

In the '70s videogames went through their first and most dramatic expansion. Arcade machines eagerly spread across North America and, shortly after, the Atari 2600 popularized the idea of owning your own gaming machine. Videogames entered popular American culture without the juvenile stigmas that have subsequently come to cling to the industry. Games were played by children and adults alike, often in public. Their visuals were abstract enough to appeal to a wide array of tastes and the gameplay was simple and reflexive. Everything was a simple geometric shape, lit in bright colors that played on primitive symbology and competitive instincts to make something that was, like all newly formed media branches, instantly intuitive.

The cultural emergence of videogames created a gold rush that public demand seemed only-too-happy to encourage. A gaggle of home console competitors jumped into the market and programmers began to crank out 2600 games as quickly as possible, many based on an absurd variety of licensed brands from Star Wars to Kool-Aid. Arcade games continued to blossom with more adventurous and colorful games like Galaxian, Battle Zone, Radar Scope, Ms. Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong. Meanwhile, computer advocates pushed videogames along a more complicated axis with early text-based games like Zork and Multi-User Dungeon experiences built from the RPG scaffolding of Dungeons & Dragons. The industry was expanding in every direction--including the first self-identified art games with Jaron Lanier's Alien Garden and Moondust for the 2600.

Which is why it was a shock when the industry went into a major recession in 1983, most dramatically affecting Atari because of the overproduction of copycat games that had finally worn out public enthusiasm for paying top prices for the same blocky formula of bleeps and bloops. At the same time, Nintendo, a Japanese novelty company that had experienced some success with arcade cabinets and portable Game & Watch devices, was nearing completion on its Famicom project. Early in 1983, Atari representatives visited Kyoto to see a prototype of the Famicom and were very close to buying the North American rights to the machine, which they'd either have declined to distribute so as to clear the market of another competitor or repackage as an extension of the Atari brand.

Nintendo is rightly credited with reviving the videogame industry from its first serious market contraction, but had Atari decided to buy the Famicom rights everything subsequent would have evolved along a much different path. To better understand what might have been, it deserves another look back at what it was that Mario actually brought to the industry and culture when he finally arrived in North America in 1985.

Mario's most lasting impact was in bringing the public perception of gaming back into focus around one simple but comprehensive experience. In the same way that Atari had become a synonym for "videogame" in the late '70s, Mario became the Kleenex of the industry, both a character, brand, and design aesthetic that crystallized what most people had loved about the form while showing how it could evolve beyond the arcanum of text dumps and rectangular blobs. Super Mario Bros. was a combination of narrative, story, and gameplay challenge, each category mixing with the other to create a game that can't be reduced to any single element.

Foremost among Mario's achievements was the connection of his jump mechanic to the idea of a long and one-way journey across a surreal landscape of winged turtles, angry mushrooms, and fire-breathing dinosaurs. The game had an aesthetic scope and detail that no game to that point could match, creating 32 levels as a linear path from a pastoral lowland to dank sewers to mountain tops to underwater seas to the dark night passage across a snow-white plain, then punctuated with scrambles through medieval castles lit with fireballs and lava. It's easy to gloss over the dramatic aesthetic changes between levels when looking back, but in 1985 there was no other game as carefully built around the idea of passage through a range of landscapes. Though its themes of anthropomorphized nature are especially connected to Japanese folklore, its scope and purpose are Homeric. It's The Odyssey of videogames, both in concept and execution.

This wasn't just a story told in the instruction manual or in brief text encounters at the end of each world, but a concept that was directly intuited through every moment of play. Where there was an enemy Mario jumped over it or on top of it. When there was an object to be climbed Mario literally traversed it. The secret caverns were discovered by players as they experimented with all the icons that filled out the world -- an inch of space along the top of the screen suggested players might be able to run on the ceiling; pipes with piranha flowers coming up might also become passages into the underground. All of the visual elements that encouraged players to experiment in the world were connected to the broader theme of journey, an epic and taxing plunge into the wide world that would be rewarded with a princess, rescued from a prehistoric devil with fire in his mouth.

Mario also excelled in pure interactivity. Old games were often based on thinly disguised mathematical formulas, whose spawn patterns, movement speeds, and increasing difficulty was easy to detect beneath the blinking sprites on screen. This was reinforced by the patently mechanical objectives of clearing the screen of enemies, reaching a certain score threshold, or discovering the repeating mix of backgrounds and objects in early scrollers like Adventure and Pitfall! Super Mario Bros. broke through this dividing wall between idea and execution by taking a refined version of the jump mechanic in the Donkey Kong games and the original Mario Bros. and tuning it so that it would be its own kind of reward to just move around in the game world and jump -- an idea that evoked the welling of recess yard energy in Mario developer Shigeru Miyamoto. Even without the narrative progression, related story, and sharply detailed environments, there was a simple joy in seeing the huge variety of Mario's jumps, minutely altered by arc, speed, and post-jump correction, with each preceded by a sound effect that become a subconscious cue for the simultaneous exhilaration and peril that usually followed after.

Another enduring part of Mario's legacy is the shift towards a more identifiably child-like sensibility in visuals that hadn't been as obvious when technology put such heavy constraints on art. Super Mario Bros.' art was fantastically sharp and detailed for its time and it was also undeniably cartoonish. The primitive angles and colors of many arcade and Atari games might have aspired to represent icons like Snoopy and Mickey Mouse, but they were so limited that they could just as plausibly evoke abstract modernism that inspired people like Lanier and Syd Mead, who helped shape the geometric futurism of Tron. With Mario, all of those abstract lines and shapes came into a focus that was less von Doesburg and more Chuck Jones.

This concept was perfectly in line with Nintendo's recent past as a toy company. The hardware that Mario was bundled with in North America showed its emphasis on child's play. The NES was a comparatively simple gray box with two buttons and its spring-loaded cartridge slot was the product of a toy maker's creativity. So, too, were the Robotic Operating Buddy and the NES Zapper, which were easy lures for children's curiosity. Sitting atop this newly imported empire of plastic was a chubby Italian man in overalls, a character that began appearing everywhere in Nintendo products like Pinball, Tennis, Wrecking Crew, and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! Indeed, since his first appearance in 1981's Donkey Kong, Mario has been in at least one videogame every year, and often times has appeared in more than 10 different games in a single year.

In the same way that Mickey Mouse came to stamp the concept of animated film as "cartoon," making any more serious animation efforts seem like a niche subset of a form defined by childish wonder, Mario dwarfed all of the disparate threads of thought and design that had churned before the release of the NES. Consumers loved Nintendo and Mario, but Mario was a cartoon mascot and he would forever be the godhead from which all subsequent works of interactive creativity issued. Whenever you hear someone say that a work is "just" a videogame or that the only relevant issue in gaming is "fun," thank Mario and Nintendo for making those ideas historical canon.

It's melodramatic to say that Nintendo saved the videogame industry. While the industry was in recession in North America, the industry had already become too popular to retreat into the waste heap of the past. What Mario did accomplish was a dramatic moment of clarity; the arrival of Super Mario Bros. was an oracular event that laid out the general ideas that would come to define the next era. At a time when no one else had convincingly evolved the form, Mario grabbed the talking stick and delivered gaming's Ten Commandments to the happily indoctrinated masses. Games shall be fun. Games shall have both a narrative and a story. The arrangement of the environment will tell you which way to go. Break everything. Games shall have endings. Games need characters. Games have secrets buried in their worlds. Enemies will look angry. Sound is a part of gameplay, both as a rhythmic guide and as a mechanical cue. Childish imagination supersedes everything.

As the industry continues to evolve around motion controls and online play, while the avenues to create and distribute games range from the wimpiest cell phone to the most modern entertainment center, Mario seems to have less and less to say about the future. Looking around it's hard to not notice the absence of another generational conduit capable bringing the inherent value and joy of playing into focus. We play in an era of loose threads and corporate gambles reaching out in every imaginable direction, just like in 1982. Wherever the existential drift takes the culture of gaming next, it will have come from a defining explosion set off when Mario arrived in America 25 years ago.

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