Whether 8-Bit, 16-Bit, or Battle Royale, It’s Always Super Mario Bros.

By Marc Normandin  |  October 15, 2025 | 3:15pm
Video Games Features Super Mario Bros.
Whether 8-Bit, 16-Bit, or Battle Royale, It’s Always Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. is 40 years old in North America on Oct. 18, which is when the NES had its limited launch in New York City, the original home of Nintendo of America, back in 1985. You are guaranteed to read articles about how important Super Mario Bros. was to the NES, to Nintendo, and to the video game industry at large—especially in North America, which suffered from the 1983 crash—as that significant anniversary approaches. If you’re of a certain age, you’re already very aware of all of that without even reading any of those articles. 

There is another angle worth pursuing when it comes to Super Mario Bros., however, and it’s about the core design and its timelessness. It was a mindblowing game in 1985—and upon its wider release alongside the NES in 1986—but it remains a joy to play in the present, too. Part of that is just because Super Mario Bros. is undeniably great, the kind of game that can be enjoyed by both less inexperienced players and also speedrunners dedicated to shaving fractions of a second off of world records. Another thing it has going for it, however, is that Nintendo has seen fit to update it, again and again, without ever having it be anything besides Super Mario Bros.

These updates are all one-offs that serve as a snapshot of a moment in time for Super Mario Bros. The original, when it first hit, had precise controls, varied environments, varied colors, and excellent level design. And while not the first platformer of its kind by any means, it was the type of game that gave its genre a major breakthrough in the minds of the public and the industry, solidifying many of its core concepts. Nintendo, and plenty of other studios, would build on the foundation that Super Mario Bros. established, further advancing and complicating side-scrolling platformers

It would also look quite old, visually speaking, years before the NES was set to retire. The version of Super Mario Bros. 2 that North America received had far more defined character sprites and more detailed foreground objects and backgrounds. Super Mario Bros. 3 has its technical issues with flickering and colors, but it’s obviously pushing the NES in a way that the original Super Mario Bros. was not. By the time the NES was sunsetting, the visual gap between games like Kirby’s Adventure and Super Mario Bros. 3 was so great that it was frankly unbelievable they both came out on the same console, and never mind the gap between it and Super Mario Bros., which had come out eight years prior.

Now, old is not bad, but even Nintendo realized that the game could be updated. And it didn’t take very long to do so, either. While Super Mario Bros. initially launched in Japan in September of ‘85 and America the next month, the arcade edition of the game, VS. Super Mario Bros., launched in those two regions in January and February of 1986, respectively. And despite coming out just a few months later, this new version looked strikingly different. Part of it is brightness and color, but there were also more details in certain sprites. Consider these comparisons of the games’ title screens…

…as well as the very beginning of the first level, 1-1, where you first discover a power-up mushroom in a question mark block:

There are font changes for the better in terms of both visual quality and readability, as well as some adjustments to the HUD to move all of that info a little lower on the screen. Thankfully, it doesn’t get in the way of what you’re doing with Mario, given the text is all a bit smaller, too. Notice that the bricks have gone from dark brown in the original Super Mario Bros. to a lighter brown in VS. Super Mario Bros., while the mushroom and green bush have both brightened. These games were mere months apart, and the VS. arcade system was based on NES hardware, as the point was to convince people that they wanted to play these games at home after experiencing them in an arcade, and yet there’s a whole different visual vibe here—Nintendo was not settling for the original look of Super Mario Bros. out of the gate, and it was VS. Super Mario Bros. that was used as the visual inspiration for Super Mario Bros. 2—eventually known as The Lost Levels outside of Japan—not Super Mario Bros. itself.

They also play differently. The core gameplay is the same, of course—they are both Super Mario Bros. after all—but this one was tailored for an arcade audience, which is to say that it’s more difficult. There are places where you expect to find a fire flower, and there isn’t one, or spaces where a 1-up would be on the NES, but it’s a power-up or coins on the VS. edition. Enemy placements are regularly different, both in terms of the number of foes in a given level and where they’re located. For instance, there are far more Bloopers in water levels than before, and Koopas are swapped in for Goombas on occasion, usually in areas where one false move would send a shell firing back and forth against close walls, increasing the chances of you taking damage or dying. 

Bowser’s castle layouts are different from those in the original, as are the obstacles for boss fights on the bridge that he (or those pretending to be him) hang out on while awaiting Mario. Warps are altered—the one in 4-2, reached via a vine hidden in a block, leads to World 6 instead of World 8 now, for instance—and the paths to them are sometimes purposefully more difficult to reach or even play on your expectations by adding in gaps to fall through that don’t exist in the original console version of the game. Bottomless pits have also been added throughout many levels, to increase the chances that you just fall and die and need to feed the machine another quarter sooner. The Koopa exploit on the stairs at the end of level 3-1 is no longer possible, either, as those enemies were replaced by Goombas to keep anyone from getting rid of the need for those extra quarters. There are also some jumps that have been purposely made to kill you unless you do things absolutely perfectly, which was not so much a thing in the original!

That difficulty also extends to which levels are even available: Super Mario Bros. has some repeating levels throughout, which have easier or more difficult versions. More obstacles, more enemies in the later editions, that sort of thing—VS. Super Mario Bros. removes nearly all of the easier stages and replaces them with the more difficult variant. Some of the 1-Up mushrooms now only appear if you collect a required (and secret) number of coins in the previous stage. Since the more difficult levels already exist as a baseline, and these stages have already been pumped full of extra enemies, there is no post-game hard mode for VS. Super Mario Bros. like there was in the NES edition. That’s probably fine.

“You mastered this, now let’s make an evil version of it for experts” was a pretty common theme with ‘80s games. VS. Super Mario Bros. was basically the halfway point between the approachable—but challenging—Super Mario Bros. and the extremely rude, designed to make you mad Super Mario Bros. 2 that Nintendo of America didn’t even want to release in their region due to said difficulty. It would eventually see North America, however, even if it had to wait until 1993: that’s when Super Mario All-Stars was released for the SNES.

Super Mario All-Stars contained remakes of all four Super Mario Bros. titles on the NES, now built from the ground up for the 16-bit SNES, and with full access to its audio hardware as well. Some glitches were fixed, control schemes altered for the comfort of the SNES controller—you can now hold down the Y button to run and use the B button to jump, a thing you know you try to do every time you play the NES version of Super Mario Bros. on hardware that has those buttons even though the original version of the game wants you to use B and A—and the games now have the ability to both save your progress and start from whatever world you feel like, so long as you had reached it in that save file.

The visual difference is the easiest thing to notice, however. Scroll back up a bit if you need to get the NES version of Super Mario Bros. fresh in your mind, and then check the Super Mario All-Stars title screen and 1-1 capture to compare:

The mushroom has taken on the appearance it’s had post-Super Mario Bros. and its Japanese sequel, the question mark boxes are now their traditional yellow, and opened boxes and the bricks have clear differences in appearance. There is grass on top of the lighter brown ground—now also clearly differentiated from the bricks in both appearance and because of the presence of that greenery—while the clouds are huge, the background sky has a gradient to it, and the bushes you see along the path have far more detail to them now. 

Another game fitting its time period and platform of choice, that, in the end, is still Super Mario Bros. Sure, you can save your game or restart from the beginning of the world you’re in after a game over, and there is just more going on visually now since the SNES can handle it with ease, but it’s still the same game at its core. 

Despite the fact that the next two versions of Super Mario Bros. were wildly different from the original for their own differing reasons, those, too, were clearly Super Mario Bros. The Game Boy Color had Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, which also rebuilt the original from the ground up for its platform, but unlike with the SNES, which was going 16-bit, Deluxe was redesigned from a resolution perspective, and with the ability to backtrack. Not all the way back to the beginning of a level, but you no longer had to worry about taking a few too many steps forward and locking yourself out. Part of that is an update for player expectations in 1999, but also to help players work around the smaller play area—Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is basically zoomed in, without the entire area around Mario visible at all times, so you have to do a little bit of backtracking just to make sure you aren’t missing anything, be it an item or a path.

Aside from the resolution and backtracking, the port is mostly just the original NES edition of the game, but there are some smaller changes worth noting as well as some major ones. You watch as Mario travels from stage to stage on a world map, and while you have no control over this, it does provide a little touch of connective tissue from level to level, as far as small tweaks go. On the more significant side, you have entire new gameplay modes that bring Super Mario Bros. into 1999. There’s a “Challenge” mode, which has you going through the original stages, but now stuffed full of hidden items and collectibles. There are five red coins per stage, plus a hidden Yoshi egg, and a minimum number of points needed to achieve the scoring goal for each level. These require you to interact with Super Mario Bros. in a way no one had bothered to before, because there simply weren’t that many hidden items or coins to find previously. It was a welcome update that gives you a new way to play without erasing the game that you already knew and loved.

There was also a competitive multiplayer platforming race mode, and a single-player variant where Mario races a Boo across a series of stages. The Lost Levels is contained within as well—Deluxe was widely praised and commercially successful for a reason, and that reason was Nintendo both updating and preserving what made Super Mario Bros. so special in the first place.

While Nintendo then went on to give everyone the original Super Mario Bros. again and again through various Virtual Consoles, for the 35th anniversary, we received the most jarringly different—but still Super Mario Bros.—version of the game yet. Super Mario Bros. 35 was an online battle royale game using levels from Super Mario Bros. for 35-player platforming deathmatches. When enemies were defeated by one player, they were teleported to another of the 35 players, with the idea being that you could eventually overwhelm them and indirectly eliminate them—the last player standing would be the winner. It was fantastic—it was competitive Super Mario Bros. in a form outside of speedrunning, perfectly tailored to the moment and platform it released for, in the same way that VS. Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. Deluxe had been before it. The only issue with the game is that it was delisted by Nintendo, and there is no Super Mario Bros. 40 to replace it. 

Kill the voice in your head that tells you that just because a game is old, it’s deficient or lacking in some way. Go play the original Super Mario Bros. a bit to celebrate it turning 40. Then go check out VS. Super Mario Bros. and then the Super Mario All-Stars edition of the game, through Hamster’s Arcade Archives and the NES portion of Nintendo Switch Online, respectively, and notice how that core gameplay concept feels just as at home in arcades and on 16-bit hardware as it did on its initial 8-bit, limited color palette console. It not just survived a number of major overhauls in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, which comfortably fit the game into an extremely different landscape 14 years after it first came out, but then Nintendo took things even further two decades later with a battle royale variant of the game. The core gameplay of Super Mario Bros. is just that strong, and it’s part of why Nintendo can keep going back to it like this, again and again. Nostalgia might be poison, but that’s not what’s going on here—Super Mario Bros. was, and is, just that good, and revisiting it in its various forms throughout the years will only convince you of as much.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin

 
Join the discussion...