Collection essentials #76 & #77: Mario Bros. (NES, US version and PAL Classic Serie version)

Oh hey, Mario’s back, and in a game’s title for the first time! I do want to quickly point out that this is not the “Mario Bros.” game that you maybe thought of at first glance. That game has an additional word in the title. This game here is Mario’s third appearance, after being the protagonist of “Donkey Kong” and the antagonist of “Donkey Kong Jr.” This game also marks the first ever appearance of Luigi, as Nintendo needed a second character for a second player to control in cooperative play. Mario wears red and Luigi wears green, and at this point that’s the only difference between them.

This is the game that established Mario and Luigi’s occupation as plumbers. The premise of this game is that monsters have infested the sewers, and Mario (sometimes with Luigi’s help if a second player joins in) is trying to get rid of them all. There are no Kongs to be found this time around. 

There are three tiers of floating platforms, and enemies come out of the pipes at the top of the screen and descend downward. Mario’s aim is to jump and hit the ceiling below the floor on which a monster is standing in order to flip them over, immobilizing them. Then Mario has several seconds to get up to that platform and kick that enemy off the screen before they get back up. He can also use the “POW” block in the bottom-middle of the screen to flip all grounded enemies at once, but that block has a limited number of uses so he can’t rely on it too much. There are three types of enemies, turtles (the first of many times Mario would fight those darn reptiles), bees that slowly hop, and crabs that take two hits to immobilize instead of one. If Mario takes a long time to clear a stage, floating fireballs will appear to try and ruin his day. There are also little blocks of ice with a face called “Freezies” which will appear and freeze the ground below, making it slippery. Every few levels, there will be a bonus stage where Mario has to try and collect all the coins within a time limit.

You’ll notice there’s a second cartridge here with different art. Even if you know what Mario Bros. is, chances are you won’t know what that second cart is or why I have it. Well, turns out that there was a remake of this game made for the Japan-only Famicom Disk System, and then in the ‘90s Nintendo decided to retool that version into an NES cartridge format…only in Europe, in two specific countries: Germany and Italy. It’s very obscure, and I didn’t know about it until fairly recently, at which point I knew I had to have it! This version is actually quite distinct in a way that is immediately obvious. Mainly, the jump physics have been changed. In the original game, you have to commit to jumping in a certain direction before lifting off the ground, as once you’re in the air you won’t be able to move back the other way. But in the remake, you have full control over your direction even while in mid-air. This really changes how the game plays. I personally think it’s more fun, though you could also argue it’s less challenging and changes the original arcade game experience on a fundamental level. There are also some graphical differences in the remake along with some fun little cutscenes that play before levels.

Mario Bros. is a fun little game that’s fun to chase high scores in, and a very significant early game in Nintendo’s history, so these two cartridges are absolute essentials.