Retro Corner: Super Mario Bros (NES) Review · 6:30pm May 31st, 2020
On this edition of Retro Corner Reviews, I have an old article from July 2016 when I went over the original Super Mario Bros on the NES. It’s often a thing for most readers to completely overlook my earlier reviews when this site first started. It is understandable as you don’t need me to say how legendary and important the original games were to the industry. You also don’t need me to explain why SMB1 is a classic and where Mario began his superstar status. Unfortunately, the other Black Box titles just don’t stack up to SMB1 when there is a reason it got packed with the console later on. That isn’t to say the other ones weren’t good as they helped gain the trust of North American consumers.
As we continue the 35th Anniversary of Mario, SMB1 is the textbook definition of an aged classic. Unlike the Metroid, Kid Icarus and Zelda NES titles, the original SMB aged much better in comparison. The reason is due to those games using ideas that were really hard to push on such limited hardware. While SMB1 had a much simpler approach to game design that didn’t require better hardware to produce the ideas in a proper manner. When you compare the first titles of Zelda and Metroid to its Super NES successors it’s obvious that was the case. It's the reason Mario World wasn’t such a massive jump when we look at Nintendo’s other mainstream series. Regardless, the first major game did its job, and that was getting as many gamers into this hobby.
