In the span of just seven months, perception of the DS had turned 180 degrees, and even the system's most vocal critics had to start begrudgingly admitting that Nintendo was on to something.
Most importantly, the DS' disruptive values had opened the door for a whole new class of uniquely styled, radically divergent video games, and the old paradigm was finally being challenged in a meaningful way.
And it was people like me who were blissfully enjoying the fruits of this revolution!
At a time when I was disenchanted with video games because of how tiresomely iterative and homogenous they were becoming, the DS came along and provided me exactly what I'd been looking for: a fresh new take on games. Now, suddenly, the medium's scope had significantly widened, and I couldn't have been happier about this outcome.
Still, though, I knew where a large part of my heart lied. While I was all for this shifting of the landscape, I was in no way calling for the abandonment of traditional games. I had no desire to see the types of games that I loved in the past (side-scrolling action games, puzzle games, adventure games, and such) disappear or find themselves minimized. To the contrary: I now hoped to see them appear in even greater number!
To me, that was the DS' true success: It had enraptured me with its collection of wonderfully inventive, excitingly new creations, yes, but moreover it had renewed my passion for video games on the whole. That's why I desired for the DS to become home to both the distinctly new and the traditional at the same time.
And that was exactly where its current course appeared to be leading us!
One game in particular spoke to that ambition. It was the game for which we'd been starving since the mid-90s. It was the game that was going to help us recover what should never have been lost. It was a brand new entry in the Super Mario Bros. series, and it was on its way to the DS!
Now, for those of us who had been around video games since virtually day one, the disappearance of 2D Mario games was a big loss. "Why has Nintendo ceased creating genuinely new 2D Super Mario games?" we wondered year after year. "Is it really the case that all future Mario games will be developed strictly in 3D?"
It was such a shame because there was no convincing evidence that people had tired of 2D Mario. Rather, it was the consensus among enthusiasts everywhere that Nintendo should never have stopped making them. Because we all knew that there was still so much room to innovate in the 2D space, and we were certain that there were so many possibilities that had been left unexplored.
I mean, even the Super Mario Advance games, which were mere remakes of classic Super Mario Bros. games, were huge sellers (they averaged somewhere around five million units sold), and that should have sent Nintendo a loud and clear message: People want more 2D Mario games, even if they're not original.
Yet the fact remained that Nintendo appeared to have no further interest in producing side-scrolling Mario games. And worse yet, the company was apparently in agreement with the prevailing attitude that 2D platformers were a thing of the past.
So sadly, it seemed as though we'd seen the last of 2D Mario.
And then it happened: In a moment's space, Nintendo washed away our feelings of hopelessness. At E3 of 2004, Shigeru Miyamoto and friends revealed it to the world: a new Super Mario Bros. game that was so single-minded in its mission and so obviously averse to subtlety that it was literally titled "New Super Mario Bros."!
What, exactly, was "new" about it, they didn't say, but I placed little importance on such details. What mattered to me most was that we were, after 14 years, finally seeing the return of 2D Mario!
Strangely, though, New Super Mario Bros. was being exhibited to the audience in a rather quiet manner. Nintendo was choosing, instead, to put a much greater focus on Super Mario 64 DS, which kind of made sense considering that it was a launch title. But still, I was surprised that the company didn't feel inclined to treat the unveiling of its new 2D Mario game as though it was a much bigger deal and act as though it was promoting the grand return of a legendary series. Instead it offered a largely uninformative 30-second trailer, and about the only thing we learned from it was that Mario could now become giant-sized and gain the ability to plow through enemies and obstacles.
Even the press coverage for the game seemed muted, with reports being limited to brief interviews and a few unenthusiastic-reading trailer breakdowns.
But to most of us, none of this mattered. We didn't need for there to be an elaborate ceremony to know what this announcement meant. This was what we'd long been waiting for. This was the Mario that we all loved and missed. And the only bad news was that we'd have to wait a year or two to finally get our hands on it!
We didn't actually see New Super Mario Bros. in action until a year later at E3 of 2005. And still it was weird: Despite the game's carrying a transformative-sounding prefix, there didn't appear to be anything particularly "new" about the way that it played. Rather, what it looked to be offering was a pretty traditional Super Mario Bros. experience.
The only real difference was its visual style, which I didn't particularly care for. It had that 2.5D presentation (polygonal characters and objects placed upon flat planes) that I always felt lacked character when compared to those from traditionally rendered 2D games, which featured detail-rich sprite-based graphics. Also, since the DS wasn't really much of a technological powerhouse, it couldn't render sharp-looking 2.5D visuals; and in New Super Mario Bros.'s case, it was hard not to notice that its graphics were kinda warped and pixelated-looking, which was something that would became especially obvious when the game's camera would zoom in close.
"They should have gone with sprites," I said to myself as I watched gameplay videos.
But again: How the game looked wasn't a make-or-break for me. It didn't really matter. All I cared about was getting a chance to play a new Super Mario Bros. game after enduring an inexplicably long layoff. I was going to be there for it no matter what it was.
And I made sure to place a pre-order for New Super Mario Bros. the moment that Nintendo gave stores the go-ahead!
A few months later, I was finally playing it. I was having a blast with 2D Mario game for which I'd been waiting 14 long years!
"So if all of that was true," you inquire in a skeptical manner, "then what about the game was actually 'new'?"
New Super Mario Bros. differentiated itself in other ways, too. Most notably, it conveyed its distinctly formed personality via its personal brand of visually interesting, sometimes-bonkers platforming sequences. It had all kinds of fun with its endless array of tilting, swaying and undulating platforms!
What New Super Mario Bros. lacked in originality, it made up for with its sheer variety. There was a lot to do in this game.
New Super Mario Bros. wasn't a bar-raising production, no. In the time that I spent with it, I never felt as though I was playing a game that eclipsed Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World or rendered either of them obsolete in any particular way. It couldn't. Because, really, that's not what it was aiming to do. Rather, it desired only to be a back-to-basics Super Mario platformer and a refresh point for the series.
But the best news was that 2D Mario was back and that New Super Mario Bros. was definitely a game off of which the series had a great chance of successfully springboarding!
Really, what Nintendo did to the Super Mario Bros. brand was inexcusable. For decades the company had done so well to nurture and protect the brand and avoid tarnishing its image by pumping out underwhelmingly iterative cookie-cutter sequels, but now, for whatever reason, its executives had made the inexplicably shortsighted decision to betray their own principles and seek to greedily wring every last penny out of the fickle customers who they knew were only buying these games because it was the trendy thing to do.
Now, I'm not saying that any of them were terrible games, no. The problem, rather, was that they weren't what they needed to be. New Super Mario Bros. Wii, despite its having multiplayer modes that held the potential for great fun, was ultimately nothing special. New Super Mario Bros. 2 (which I purchased purely on impulse) was supremely forgettable, and had it lacked that prominently advertised coin-collecting gimmick, I wouldn't have remembered a thing about it. And I didn't even think about buying New Super Mario Bros. U. Because nothing about it was compelling. In fact, there had never been a mainline Mario game in which I was less interested! So I passed on it.
But regardless of the ill feelings that I hold for the series as a whole, I remain quite fond of the first New Super Mario Bros. For as long as I live, I'll continue to cherish the memories of the time that I was spent with it. It wasn't an all-time-great platformer, no, nor was it a huge advancement over the series' older 2D entries, but it did a lot of things right. It was creative, inspiriting, and really fun to play, which was a winning combination in my book.
Mario was there to answer the call and fill us with optimistic spirit. He was back. Super Mario Bros. was back.
That's what New Super Mario Bros. represented to me: good times during one of the best eras in gaming history. I'm glad that I savored both it and the (sadly nonreplicated) generation that it helped to define.
So here's to New Super Mario Bros.: the game that helped to define the Nintendo DS and usher in one of the greatest eras the medium has ever known.
A few months later, I was finally playing it. I was having a blast with 2D Mario game for which I'd been waiting 14 long years!
It was a great time in my gaming life.
My experience with New Super Mario Bros. is memorable to me not for my remembered chronology of events but because of how well the game did to capture the spirit of the moment and fill me positive feelings. So consequently I'm going to speak about the game's impact in more general terms.
The first thing that I remember is how I felt about the game's visuals the first time that I saw them in a more personal setting: I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they were actually pretty solid! For certain, this was a much more attractive-looking game than I'd originally judged it to be.
I mean, I still would have preferred for its graphics to be sprite-based, sure, yet I couldn't deny that there were clear benefits to the 2.5D presentation. To start, the use of 3D character models opened the door for the inclusion of Super Mario 64 enemies and supporting characters and allowed for them to ripped directly from the game of origin, and that was important to me because I'd always been bothered by the visual disconnect that existed between the 2D and 3D Mario games. I was just never able to reconcile their discordant graphical values.
But simply seeing Swoopers, Scuttlebugs and Dorrie (the helpful plesiosaur from Hazy Maze Cave) intermixed with classically rendered, Super Mario Bros.-style characters and environments and merely observing how they functioned within flat, side-scrolling spaces went a long way toward helping me to bridge the gap.
That's what I appreciated most about the game's 2.5D visual style.
And considering that the DS was most comparable to the N64 in terms of power, the inclusion of enemies from Super Mario 64 seemed highly appropriate to me. It created a strong spiritual connection between two systems that I adored.
New Super Mario Bros. incorporated multiple Super Mario 64 elements (familiar characters, recognizable voice and sound samples, the triple jump, ground-pounding, wall-jumping, etc.), but it didn't stop there, no. Rather, it also made sure to reference other classic Mario platformers.
That became evident to me any time I was exploring a labyrinthine Ghost House, throwing a Bob-omb toward a destructible wall, sliding down a slop and wiping out a string of Goombas, riding along on a snaking platform, getting eaten by a Big Bertha-like Cheep Chomp, or switching between the front and back side of chain fence.
New Super Mario Bros., I was thrilled to learn, was one big love letter to the entire Super Mario series.
"So if all of that was true," you inquire in a skeptical manner, "then what about the game was actually 'new'?"
Well, it was true that New Super Mario Bros. was largely derivative and that its dependence on recycled elements and assets worked to bely its contemporary-sounding title, but still it did make a few unique contributions to the series.
The best example was its introduction of interesting new power-ups like the Mega Mushroom, which allowed the brothers to temporarily grow more than three-times their normal size and use their newly added girth to plow through enemies, blocks, warp pipes, Bullet Bill dispensers, flag poles, and just about anything else that stood in their way; the Mini Mushroom, which shrunk them down and made them tiny enough to run across the surface of water, squeeze through the tiniest of gaps, and leap great distances; and the Blue Shell, donning which allowed them to repel certain attacks (by crouching) and slide across surfaces in Koopa-shell form and thus bowl over strings of enemies and shatter breakable blocks from the side.
All three of these power-ups were great additions, and I had a ton of fun putting them to use and experimenting with them. What I liked to do most, actually, was keep them stored in my lower-screen inventory and bust them out in stages whose structuring visually discouraged their use (like the swamp stages in which you rode atop Dorrie). You know: Just so I could see what would happen!
My only disappointment was that the game didn't have more power-ups. But that was just me continuing to hold on to the delusion that one day a new Super Mario game would come along and strive to meet Super Mario Bros. 3's standard in terms of number of power-ups and suits or even exceed it.
25 years later, I'm still holding on to that delusion.
New Super Mario Bros. differentiated itself in other ways, too. Most notably, it conveyed its distinctly formed personality via its personal brand of visually interesting, sometimes-bonkers platforming sequences. It had all kinds of fun with its endless array of tilting, swaying and undulating platforms!
Also, it introduced plenty of other ideas. Some of its stages had me swinging across series of vines or ropes that were attached to track-mounted devices; walking or riding atop giant-sized characters (like Wiggler and Dorrie); sliding along mountain edges; spinning through the air, tornado-style, and aiming to work my way over and around expansive, multi-level environments; and doing a lot of other fun and wacky things.
And all of it felt captivating and new.
The game otherwise contained a collection of uniquely scripted boss battles, which previous 2D Mario game tended to lack. It had a large number of lengthy, specially themed stages. And it introduced an interesting take on world progression: In order to gain entrance into Worlds 4 and 7, both of which appeared to be completely inaccessible, you had to endure Worlds 2 and 5's castle stages as Mini Mario and take down their bosses in that form! This would allow you to escape the castles via tiny passages that led directly to the alternate worlds!
I really liked the idea of having to face an extremely perilous challenges to access a hidden world. Reaching a new world in that manner imbued me with a greater sense of accomplishment and made me feel as though I'd just endured a mighty struggle and bravely earned the right to access a mysterious sacred land.
I wished that all future Super Mario games would include such challenges.
What New Super Mario Bros. lacked in originality, it made up for with its sheer variety. There was a lot to do in this game.
In particular, I enjoyed finding all of the big coins and unlocking all of the Toad houses. I greatly enjoyed scouring stages in search of them, and I did so mostly because the stages were so nicely designed and fun to traverse and explore. I was happy to find any excuse that I could to return to them.
Really, the whole game was fun! It provided me a great all-around entertainment experience. I liked playing it. I liked looking at it. And I liked listening to it and soaking in its wonderfully inspiriting vibes. Everything about it spoke of what was so special about that particular moment in video-game history, and that's why it was such a standout game for me. It was why I was so drawn to it.
"What a time in gaming history!" I'd think to myself whenever I was playing it.
The game's alluring personality was formed in large part by its delightful soundtrack, which was replete with blissful and optimistic spirit. I loved, in particular, how the music played into the action. I thought it was hilarious how the enemies would make sure to momentarily stop in place so that they could take the time to bop to the overworld tune's most accented and most recurring note ("BWAH-BWAH," as we'd spell it phonetically). It gave the game so much unique character.
Ordinarily, having characters bop to a game's music was the domain of wiseguy players like me, but now the games, themselves, were apparently looking to get in on the act and steal our heat! And that was fine by me because I was welcoming of such silliness.
It said to me that even the enemies were excited about the game and the new era that it was helping to usher in! They were in the spirit, too!
Well, to be honest, I liked the enemy-music synchronization except in instances in when an enemy's sudden pause would result in my screwing up the timing on a stomp or bounce attempt. Then I didn't like it one bit. No, sir.
New Super Mario Bros. wasn't a bar-raising production, no. In the time that I spent with it, I never felt as though I was playing a game that eclipsed Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World or rendered either of them obsolete in any particular way. It couldn't. Because, really, that's not what it was aiming to do. Rather, it desired only to be a back-to-basics Super Mario platformer and a refresh point for the series.
And I was OK with that. I didn't mind that it had such a narrow focus. Because it was what we needed at the time: the necessary reestablishing of the Super Mario Bros. series' core values during a period of great change and specifically a time in which so many lapsed gamers were getting back into video games and so many new people were being introduced to them. And because ours was a true desire to see Mario ascend back to the top of the mountain, upon which he hadn't stood for almost a decade, we needed for those two groups to pad our ranks. We needed for New Super Mario Bros.'s strong accessibility factor to be a welcoming force and make believers out of them.
Then we would all be able to move forward together.
All I knew was that I was happy to be playing New Super Mario Bros. at that particular moment in time. That's why I labeled it "the ultimate feel-good spring and summer game." It was the type of game that you'd pop into your DS on a sunny, peaceful afternoon when all of the windows were open, the birds were chirping, the atmosphere was reminiscent of those ol' summer-vacation days, and you wanted to feel good about playing video games at a special time in history.
New Super Mario Bros. captured the moment and always filled me with positive feelings, and that's why I continued to return to it.
But the best news was that 2D Mario was back and that New Super Mario Bros. was definitely a game off of which the series had a great chance of successfully springboarding!
I couldn't wait to see how Nintendo was going to follow it up and find out where Miyamoto and pals were planning to take us next. "Will the sequel be as wonderfully divergent as, say, Super Mario Bros. 2?" I wondered with an excited energy. "Or will it be something so amazingly innovative that my human brain is simply unable to comprehend what such a product would look like?!"
And, well, we all know how that story played out. To my great disappointment, it never advanced past the prologue. None of the three subsequent New Super Mario Bros. games sought to meaningfully evolve the original's formula, and not a single one of them endeavored to take us to a new place.
You didn't even have to examine the three games up close to tell that they were all visually and thematically identical and thus almost impossible to distinguish.
I was expecting for the series to undergo a creative renaissance and gloriously reinvent itself, but instead it decided to run in place for the next six years.
Really, what Nintendo did to the Super Mario Bros. brand was inexcusable. For decades the company had done so well to nurture and protect the brand and avoid tarnishing its image by pumping out underwhelmingly iterative cookie-cutter sequels, but now, for whatever reason, its executives had made the inexplicably shortsighted decision to betray their own principles and seek to greedily wring every last penny out of the fickle customers who they knew were only buying these games because it was the trendy thing to do.
Suddenly Iwata and his staff, who surely understood the medium's history and were well aware of why so many big-name franchises had died off, were determined to ignore all of the available data and heedlessly produce an endless string of creatively uninspired, visually identical New Super Mario Bros. games. And they were doing this at the expense of the always-trusty Mario character, who was now, resultantly, no longer associated with top-tier 2D platformers.
What was at first unique quickly became generic, and that simply shouldn't have been allowed to happen.
"Mainline Mario games should never be perceived as 'generic,'" we all would have agreed. Yet now they were. And consequently there was no longer anything special about them.
What Nintendo did was turn the Super Mario Bros. brand into a pure product, with each new release feeling as though it was born not from the imaginations of passionate, ambitious creators but rather from the robotic, purely functional mechanisms of the nearest assembly line.
"Why the hell are they doing this to such a beloved series?!" I continued to question, my frustration-level increasing each time the company announced another samey-looking New Super Mario Bros. game. "Don't they understand that standardizing the series will likely come with serious repercussions?"
Now, I'm not saying that any of them were terrible games, no. The problem, rather, was that they weren't what they needed to be. New Super Mario Bros. Wii, despite its having multiplayer modes that held the potential for great fun, was ultimately nothing special. New Super Mario Bros. 2 (which I purchased purely on impulse) was supremely forgettable, and had it lacked that prominently advertised coin-collecting gimmick, I wouldn't have remembered a thing about it. And I didn't even think about buying New Super Mario Bros. U. Because nothing about it was compelling. In fact, there had never been a mainline Mario game in which I was less interested! So I passed on it.
And you know what? I felt no regret about doing so. Not for a moment did I ever feel as though I was missing anything by not playing it.
That should tell you something.
And I remember how a cold chill ran down my spine when I read that Iwata told investors to expect even more New Super Mario Bros. games. "God no," I said to myself in that moment. "We don't need any more of that!"
So far, thankfully, nothing has become of that statement.
And let's hope that it stays that way.
If we're lucky, Super Mario Run will be the last that we see of the New Super Mario Bros. series and its tired, generic visual presentation.
But regardless of the ill feelings that I hold for the series as a whole, I remain quite fond of the first New Super Mario Bros. For as long as I live, I'll continue to cherish the memories of the time that I was spent with it. It wasn't an all-time-great platformer, no, nor was it a huge advancement over the series' older 2D entries, but it did a lot of things right. It was creative, inspiriting, and really fun to play, which was a winning combination in my book.
And, of course, it arrived at the perfect time: when the Nintendo DS was riding a wave of momentum the likes of which we'd never seen, when the gaming world was changing for the better, and when people were clamoring for the types of games that originally brought them to the dance--the types of games that were lost to the console arms race.
Mario was there to answer the call and fill us with optimistic spirit. He was back. Super Mario Bros. was back.
2D gaming wasn't dead, as "hardcore" gamers had smugly proclaimed, no. It was alive and well on the DS. There was plenty of room for it on Nintendo's dual-screened wonder. There was plenty of room for every type of game, in fact.
The future was looking bright.
That's what New Super Mario Bros. represented to me: good times during one of the best eras in gaming history. I'm glad that I savored both it and the (sadly nonreplicated) generation that it helped to define.
Whenever I think about New Super Mario Bros., I instantly recall why I loved that era of gaming. The memories and mental images that the game evokes are very powerful, and they never fail to remind me of everything that I considered great about that period.
That, to me, is the profile of a truly impactful Super Mario Bros. game.
So here's to New Super Mario Bros.: the game that helped to define the Nintendo DS and usher in one of the greatest eras the medium has ever known.
The gaming world was a much better place because of it.
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