You Played Mario, So What?

Nostalgia's Strange Distillation of a Strange Video Game

I don't really care to engage anyone in the discussion of what makes someone a gamer or not. My take is that if you enjoy playing video games (plural), you are a gamer regardless of what those games might be. Still, I do feel a shred of disappointment when I meet someone whose passion is focused squarely on titles like Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or Words with Friends, which are all primarily mobile-based. There is nothing wrong with these games – they all provide a continual challenge, the first requiring both mental and physical dexterity to master –, but I usually gravitate towards those who enjoy playing plot-oriented games or those with really unique mechanics or graphics. I like the big games. I also don't play mobile games.

One thing I've noticed with regards to people in my age bracket, the roughly 30-35 year-old one, is that a common response to asking someone if he or she games is "I played Mario." This means a myriad of things, of course, as Mario has been featured in over 200 video game titles since his inception. What it does usually boil down to, though, is that the person used to play either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario World as a child. (Make that age bracket 25-35 for the latter.) Unfortunately for me, the gamer seeker, it means that the only relationship they had with "core" games began and ended over 20 years ago. Again, this is not to pass judgment. Playing video games is a hobby, and everyone is willing to devote only so much time to it, which also can translate to no time at all.

With all sincerity, I do think that Super Mario World is one of the best games ever made. It features sheer entertainment value on its surface and a ridiculous ton of secrets to discover at its core. It's also a dramatic expansion of the world explored in the previous games in the series, which vary depending on whether you were raised in Japan on the United States. What I do find peculiar is Mario's lasting legacy in culture today. As judged by the folks at Guinness, he's the second most recognizable video game character to Pac-Man, something I can delve into later. However, Mario paraphernalia has become something of a badge of acceptance among people in general, not just gamers. It is wholly appropriate to wear something with Mario or another character from his universe, probably Yoshi, without any expectation being made of your gaming habits.

We all loved Super Mario Bros., right? Maybe. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, actually. My neighbor did. I moved to my hometown when I was about five years old during my kindergarten year, 1987. In 1989, shortly before I turned seven years old, a pair of kids moved in next door, and they brought with them several Atari systems and the NES. I hadn't played a video game at home yet, and I was always excited to go over there and play. I honestly really enjoyed a lot of the Atari games, though I probably wouldn't touch any of them today. I can't even recall the names of what I played. Of course, along with the NES, my neighbors had Super Mario Bros.

I wasn't good at it or any game for that matter. I never got far in SMB mainly because I didn't have the time to master it. It wasn't inside my home, and as a kid, I had enough energy to want to go outside to play sometimes. I didn't discover warp zones without his or a magazine's aid. But the game did have some appeal, and I would enjoy picking it up now and again. Coupled with not being particularly good at it, I was The Exemplar for the sway – I would attempt to coax Mario across a large gap by moving my entire body in the direction of the jump, sometimes emitting a troubled noise with it. I may not have grown out of this. It's very compelling.

What this boils down to is that you played Mario when you were little. So did I. So what? Why does he get special treatment compared to countless other video game characters?

Saturation helps.

In the US, the Nintendo Entertainment System came with Super Mario Bros. by default. OK, that's notSuper Mario Bros., which was the majority of the offerings in 1985. It was nigh a guarantee that if you owned an NES, you owned SMB. Next, without going too far into it, the NES was the only video game system being sold. After the video game crash of 1983, stores were extremely hesitant to carry another video game system. The fact is that every manufacturer tried to make an Atari or an analog of an Atari, which created an overly segmented market, meaning little money for everybody involved, most notably the stores. When that got buried (like a certain game), "video game" became a four-letter word as far as stores were concerned.
exactly accurate. If you actually cared about value, you bought an NES that was bundled with

Due to the spectacular and extremely risky efforts of Nintendo, stores finally agreed to carry the NES, and it was a booming success. (If you'd like to read more about the whole ordeal, Greg Knight wrote a great essay about it on his blog, and he provides his sources for more reading.) Overall, Nintendo sold 30 million units in the US by 1991, which accounts for roughly 11% of the entire US population by that time. That is not only a significant chunk of the population, but it also translated to 30 million default Super Marios Bros. players. The only other games to achieve similar market saturation have also been bundled inclusions. I'm also neglecting to include worldwide sales on the game, which came out to about 62 million.

When you boil all of this down, it's fair to assume about 1 in 10 people (probably a little less given more precise analysis) living in the US between 1985 and 1991 have owned Super Mario Bros. This figure does increase when you account for people who just played the game at someone else's house but didn't own it themselves. The level to which Mario has left an effect on people around my age is significant. Even if you don't play any video games today, chances are that you played at least this one title on this one system. Let's not forget that the game was featured again in Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, made available digitally via the Wii Virtual Console, and the countless number of people my age who were in college during the Napster (read: piracy) heyday. That was a time when a ridiculous number of old games were accessible through websites and emulators, their size being remarkably permissive even on dial-up connections at home.

Only Super Mario World after it achieved a notable amount of saturation, though not as much. Also, Mario's future games did not achieve the same amount of saturation although they were all successful. Oddly enough, despite retaining the weird elements of the original, these games also were more cohesive in their execution.

Super Mario Bros. didn't make sense, something which people eat up like candy.

I'm sorry to generalize, but we didn't really analyze games when we were little. We either enjoyed playing them or we didn't. Many of our favorite childhood games' stories were contained in their manuals, the conclusions sussed out by beating them. This isn't true of all games, but the largest extent to which SMB presents a story during its gameplay is by uttering, "But our princess is in another castle." You could argue that this counts as a twist, but it happens seven times during the course of play. This was positive, though, because it meant that there was much more game to play compared to the Atari offerings, which only boosted speed or enemy frequency to maintain challenge almost endlessly.

Mushroom

As much as we joke about the elements that make up Mario games, they managed to persist through multiple iterations. Everything that is ridiculous about the first game became iconic. Mario and his brother, Luigi, are plumbers who were magically sucked down a drain into the Mushroom Kingdom. For whatever reason, these plumbers were tasked with saving Princess Toadstool, a human princess in a world full of, um, mushroom people. The kidnapper is a giant bipedal turtle, Bowser, who spits fire. So far, none of this makes sense.

The plumbers, one at a time, must proceed through stages that inexplicably contain giant pipes everywhere, only some of which they can or have to enter to proceed. They can also breathe underwater ad infinitum, though that is eventually adjusted in Mario 64. The first enemy Mario encounters is a goomba, which is a mushroom-like thing that he can stomp on once to eliminate. (In 1985, this was not the most common way to murder animals or the like, I promise you.) The goomba is followed by a koopa troopa, a smaller bipedal turtle that can be stomped on so as to throw his shell around. To aid Mario in his quest, he must punch blocks with question marks on them, which can yield coins in a world without an economy, mushrooms that makes him grow larger for some reason, mushrooms that grant him extra lives because that's a thing down there, or fire flowers, which both alter his outfit and allow him to shoot fire. You encounter most of these things in under a minute after starting the game.

Also a mushroom

If the internet today is any indicator, it should then become no surprise that everything that made up Super Mario Bros. became memorable by virtue of the fact that it didn't make sense. Yes, it was a good game which featured challenging platforming gameplay and a handful of secrets and tricks. But these elements didn't contribute to today's popular culture; rather, they served to retain a section of that population as gamers and inspire future, more cohesive games. Each ridiculous aspect about the Mario universe stands out from one another and so becomes easily memorable and easily marketable in the future. Society loves disruption. Then, along came Yoshi, the Mario equivalent of a kitten.

Memories become distilled over time. Icons remain.

As stated above, Mario is not the most recognizable video game character ever. Pac-Man is. First, Pac-Man manages to increase the age bracket again from the larger end, and as I pointed out from my personal story, some people were still playing Atari in the late 80s. However, Pac-Man's fame came from the arcade; the Atari version of the game was so over-simplified that it was rejected compared to the original. His recognition stems from his form. He's a circle missing a piece, a yellow pie. Why he's not as marketable today as Mario probably lays with the fact that his universe lacks enough other pieces to be as interesting. Aside from Pac-Man, there are only the differently-colored ghosts and the white pellets. If Pokémon was only about Ash and Pikachu, it wouldn't be as popular. The hook is the pieces, the other pokémon, who are more memorable and universal than the games they star in. Again, this is a matter of popular culture versus smaller subsects, i.e., gaming or anime cultures.

Applying this idea to Super Mario Bros., it's not hard to discern why we hold Mario and the other pieces dear. Over time, the game has become pieces, all of which are weird and colorful, iconic and cute. To its credit, none of the enemies are menacing in their appearance save for Bowser, so they were adopted into popular culture as well. But you'll notice that while people will recognize a goomba or a koopa troopa whether or not they can name them, they are less familiar with other enemies from the series. They will recognize the sound of a coin being grabbed. And everyone knows the music. Why? Also as mentioned, you encounter these things in under a minute after starting the game.

This is ultimately the key behind each icon's success, including Mario. If you've played and finished Super Mario Bros., if you've played the game on and off at a friend's house, or if you started the game and decided it ultimately wasn't for you, you remember that first minute more than anything else about it. Everyone remembers the pieces despite having very different memories of the gameplay. Over time, the gameplay doesn't last so much, and this idea crosses over into other games that have become iconic over time, though less so, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. With enough saturation and enough disparate elements, those jarring pieces juxtaposed against one another become memorable and all that is left to remember if you didn't pursue playing video games as a hobby.

The same applies to movies (Indiana Jones, E.T., Back to the Future), books (If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Amelia Bedelia, Choose Your Own Adventure), and even other forms of art (Mona Lisa, Persistence of Memory, Moonlight Sonata). We remember their essence and their elements more so than their experience or sometimes their names or the names of their elements. This is most true of video games because movies, books, paintings, and music don't require skill to complete experiencing them. Many people don't finish games, so it's the beginnings that matter most.

Mario rode the unexpected booming success of the Nintendo Entertainment System into our memories and our hearts despite us. He became equivalent with our childhood regardless of the amount of time we spent with him. He was something that was there when we were a child, and we either interacted by controlling or spectating. It doesn't take a psychology degree to know that we tend to hold pieces of our childhood dear even if our childhood as a whole was unpleasant. We hold onto the things we can remember because every day we forget more and more about what happened to us back then.

Unlike a good many things that existed back then, Mario is immortal. The people have chosen to keep him alive. I'm one of them, I suppose.

Images obtained from various places around the internet. If you own an image and would like me to remove it, please email me, and I will do so.