Please, angry mob, wait! It’s true, I had never finished Super Mario Bros. before this week, but that’s not to say that I hadn’t played it before. If you’ll put your pitchforks and burning torches down for a moment, I promise, I can explain.
It was 2004 when I first came into contact with Super Mario Bros. I remember that because I had just received a Game Boy Advance for my birthday, and in a vague attempt to put me onto a “proper” game and dissuade me from my copy of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie tie-in platformer, my dad bought me the SMB GBA re-release.
Now yes, the handheld’s Classic NES Series version might not have been the ideal way to experience it for the first time — the squashed image, poorly lit screen, dinky little speakers, etc. — but six-year-old Jim knew no better, so I showed willing and cracked on with it.
That first play has stayed in my head. My friend had the zoomed-in Deluxe version on her Game Boy Color, and I distinctly remember comparing notes about how far we had made it through each level. My first time sneaking under Bowser in World 1-4 and sending him into the lava below was a particular point of conversation at the school lunch table, and while I never made it all that far before hitting a ‘Game Over’, I still managed to get a good few Worlds under my belt. I must have been better at games back then than I am today.
But then, for whatever reason, I stopped. Perhaps it was my inability to make it through the later stages. Perhaps the 32-bit GBA’s larger colour palette and sexy sprite potential made me turn my nose up at anything that felt distinctly ‘old’. Perhaps my eye was swayed by another attractive tie-in banger, because who would choose a little-known, blocky curio when the solid-gold Crazy Frog Racer is right there (this is a joke, please don’t hurt me).
Whatever the cause, I moved on and never went back. It’s not like Nintendo hasn’t given me ample opportunity to play it on every single console released since, but, at the time, I was far more interested in what was new instead of what I had missed.
So, I never picked it up on a Virtual Console, I didn’t have the money for one of those sexy Game & Watches or NES Classic Minis, and you know I wasn’t heading up to Argos to buy any of the ‘remixed’ versions on Wii U or 3DS. As for Nintendo Switch Online… yeahh, I don’t really have an excuse for that one.
All this is to say that the best part of 22 years have passed since I first played SMB on my Game Boy Advance, and I still hadn’t seen the fabled 8-4. Until this week.
Knowing that the 40th anniversary was right around the corner, I decided to buck up my ideas and finally fill in my biggest blind spot in gaming. I fired up NSO, started from the very beginning, and in just a couple of hours — made all the shorter by the blessing of Rewind — I finally made it to the very end.
I don’t know where exactly I stopped playing all those years ago, but if I had to guess, I’d say that everything from World 6 onwards felt new. This meant that I had never seen the monochrome 6-3, I had never dodged the flying Cheep Cheep bridge in 7-3 (although that feels like 2-3+, to be fair), and I had to actually work out the maze solutions in the final two castles.
It’s got to be said — news flash! — it’s a good game. There’s a lot here that feels a bit outdated by today’s standards (from a 40-year-old game? Never!), but on the whole, I was impressed by how not-outdated it felt.
Mario’s jump always has been, and always will be, super satisfying. Lakitu is still an arsehole if you don’t bop him on the head at early doors. And I wasn’t anticipating quite so much of a difficulty spike at the end. I’m not going to say it’s Dark Souls, but I’m once again grateful to the NSO gods for blessing us with the Rewind feature.
After more retries than I care to admit, I ducked under Bowser’s legs one last time and finally, finally, found Princess Peach Toadstool in the right castle. It was a good feeling, made all the sweeter by the sound of my previously revoked membership card to the Nintendo Fan Club dropping through my postbox.
And to think, it only took four decades of the game being on the market for me to finish it. Come back in 2036 to see me finally play Super Mario 64 (this is another joke, I promise).
