Mario Bros. arcade flyer
Nintendo (1983)
The Super Mario Bros Movie is premiering in theaters across the United States tomorrow, which is approximately 40 years from the release Mario and Luigi's first partnership - the 1983 arcade classic Mario Bros.
This game plays almost nothing like it's more popular sequel Super Mario Bros, which appeared a few years later on the Nintendo Entertainment System. If you try to jump on an enemy's back in Mario Bros. like you would in Super Mario Bros, you're going to lose one of your lives. Instead, you have to hit the bad guys from underneath by going to the level below them and jumping up to hit the floor that they're standing on. The goal is to smack the bad guys until they flip upside down, and then jump up to their level to kick them off the platform while they're still upside down. However, you only have a couple of seconds to get to them after you've knocked them upside down before they get back up, at which point they will be much faster and harder to hit again.
The first version of the original Mario Bros. that I played when I was a kid was the Atari 2600 port, but the arcade game is the one that has stuck with me through the years. It was made available for download on the Nintendo Switch, and it's one of the games that I find myself playing at least once just about every time that I pick up the console. As you can see from the top scores in the screenshot above, I'm not very good at it, but I love to play it all the same.
I'm sure that Mario Bros. probably would feel overly simplistic to a kid today who is the same age as I was when I first played this game, but I think it holds up very well after forty years. Give it a shot and see if you agree.
