Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #7

Mario Bros.

And then there was that other Mario game.

You've probably heard of it.

So let's spend a few minutes talking about Mario Bros.--Nintendo's humble little arcade classic.

Now, Mario Bros. didn't have nearly as big an impact on my life as so many of Nintendo's other classics, no, but I wouldn't be telling the complete story of my history with games if I didn't talk about the types of fun experiences I had with it. I'd be neglecting to mention the noteworthy ways in which it brought my friends and I together and the indelible memories it left.

Honestly, though, the relationship started off kinda rocky.

Back then, in my earliest years, I just couldn't form a solid connection to Mario Bros. In the two or three times that I played it, I lost interest within a few minutes, and thus I wasn't able to get a feel for its depth or even recognize that it had any real depth.

The problem, I can see, is that there was never anyone there to play it with me; I hadn't yet met the people who would go on to become my closest friends--those who would travel with me to arcades--and my brother, who usually was there with me, was more interested in playing racing and flight-simulation games. So in those days, I was mostly alone; and because that was the case, there was no chance that I was going to find the appeal in a game whose true emphasis was multiplayer.

By the time I started to value multiplayer games, though, it was too late. Mario Bros. was an old game, and all of my attention was focused squarely on the technologically superior next-generation multiplayer games that were now flooding the market--games like Ikari Warriors and Rampage, with which my friends and I were obsessed. We had no time to dedicate to some ancient single-screen platformer!

I can tell you now, of course, that ours was a stupid attitude and that our ignoring arcade Mario Bros. represented a lost opportunity.

Thankfully, though, we were able to remedy our error in some other way.

Thankfully we had the NES--a platform on which old arcade games could get second leases on life.

And it's on the NES that had my first genuine Mario Bros. experience. It happened in early 1987, right after my friend Dominick revealed to me that there was an NES version of the game (he'd just bought it a few days earlier)!

I was honestly fascinated with this revelation. For reasons I can't explain, I always found it to be amazingly mind-blowing when a console port of an arcade game managed to look identical to the original. In my mind, even "old" arcade hardware was vastly superior to what the NES offered, so I imagined that Mario Bros.' looking the same as the arcade original had to be the work of wizardry! Of course, they weren't really identical, no--Nintendo had to make some technological and graphical comprises in order to get the game to run on the comparatively limited NES--but my 9-year-old self didn't see it that way, since he wasn't yet able to perceive such honestly negligible differences.

So as far as I was concerned, the two games looked and played exactly the same!

And in the following hours, I discovered the true appeal of Mario Bros.: It was a frenzied, chaotic multiplayer romp that invited you to interact with your buddy in the most playfully fun ways! The two of you could cooperate and help each other to control the chaos--be as efficient as possible and prevent the pipe-crawling enemies from crowding onto the screen--or each of you could mischievously screw the other over (bump him into an active enemy or a fireball or overturn an immobile enemy from below just as he's about to kick it away) and try to take all of the glory for yourself! And regardless of how the two of you decided to play it, you'd share a lot of laughs and have a great time!

And every now and then, that's exactly what we'd do: pop Mario Bros. into the NES and have a lot of fun either cooperating--attempting to make it as far into the game as we could (I don't think that we ever made it past the mid-20 phases)--or trying to kill each other off as quickly as possible! Of course, there were plenty of instances in which we'd agree to play cooperatively and then turn on each other when it was tempting to do so. You know--when it was really funny.

(I admit that it was usually me doing most of the screwing. Though, I blame all such incidents on my penchant for spazzing out at the very sight of fireballs. That's the reason I kept cutting off your escape path whenever you were running from a pack of crabs, ol' pals! Honest!)

There were never any hard feelings, though. We knew that it was all in good fun.

We also found other ways to have fun while playing Mario Bros. Mostly, we enjoyed all of the interesting and amusing conversations that its existence inspired. During any play-through, we'd pay close attention to the game's mechanics and then talk and theorize about how they evolved into those that came to define Super Mario Bros., which had since taken over the world. We'd observe the game's world and its characters and ask pertinent questions like, "Are these Shellcreepers really just Koopa Troopers bearing a different name?" and "Taking into account the brothers' current occupation and all of these green pipes, can we assume that Mario Bros.' 'ending' is the point at which they were sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom" (we were so invested in this idea that we'd try to survive as long as possible just to see if the game had an ending--one that could confirm our head-canon).

And as we did during our play-throughs of Wrecking Crew, we'd excitedly talk about the brothers' many side games and try to figure out how they fit into the overarching Mario canon. We'd put together timelines of Mario's life and try to piece together when, exactly, he settled into each of his odd jobs and how all of these events led to his becoming to a plumber who got sucked down a drain. "Was he a construction worker before he served as an operator at the cement factory?" we'd try to determine. "And just where do his sports-officiating roles fit into the larger picture?"

Back then, in the days before Nintendo casually dismissed any notion that there was a continuity or a canon to the Mario series, it was fun to wonder about such things.

So in the end, while we didn't put as much time into Mario Bros. as we did into Balloon Fight or Ice Climber, we still managed to extract plenty of memorably fun entertainment from it. It was the kind of game that could dependably help us to kill a half hour or so and have some laughs while we were waiting for our dinner to arrive or for the wrestling PPV to start.

For most of my adult life, I thought of Mario Bros. as a game that I would never seriously return to. "It's one of those games that you load up for a randomly timed revisit and play for a few minutes before you grow bored of it," I'd tell myself. "And the only time you're likely to do that is when you discover that it's included as a 'neat' extra in a current-day Nintendo game!"

Though, my opinion completely changed in December of 2017, on the day when the Hamster Corporation released its Arcade Archives version of Mario Bros. I hurried to purchase it not because I had a deep desire to play it, no, but because I'd promised myself that I'd buy any official Nintendo arcade re-release on principle--to help send the company a message that fighting for the right to re-publish your classic arcade games is the correct thing to do and something you should continue to do (I'll have more to say about this in my future Donkey Kong piece). "I'm probably not going to play it much or extract much value from it, no," I thought, "but that's fine because at least I contributed to a worthy cause."

But you know what? I wound up being fully engrossed by the game! Mario Bros., it turns out, is quite an addictive single-player game! It's not at all like the NES version, which goes gentle on you for its first 10-12 phases and pretty much puts you to sleep, no; it goes full no-mercy on you within three phases, and by doing so, it keeps its action lively and stressfully frantic and thus engagingly visceral. And because it does this so well, you come away craving the type of gameplay it offers--the type that challenges you to survive as long as you can and in the process perform more capably and achieve a higher score than you did in your last attempt.

And I've been taking on that challenge ever since then. Every couple of months or so, I load up arcade Mario Bros. and attempt to earn a higher score and thus move up on the online leader board. And each time, most importantly, I have a whole lot of fun.

What hasn't changed--and what doesn't need to change--is my appreciation for the ways in which Mario Bros. contributed to and shaped my favorite medium: It established many of the conventions upon which the platforming genre was built--ever-replicated mechanics like block-punching, enemy-flipping and pipe-crawling. It created the blueprint for Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, and many of the other cooperate-or-compete-style single-screen platformers from which we derived so much enjoyment. And, above all, it helped to create the Mario universe and by extension a series of amazingly impactful games--the kind that touched the lives of all of those who played them.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how cool it was that specially modified versions of Mario Bros. comprised certain minigames Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Super Mario Advance games and therein enhanced their action in very meaningful ways; it's just such a clever way to pay homage to a foundational game and at the same time use it to enhance another work. Also, I always like to point out a connection that people miss: You know how in the Super Smash Bros. games you respawn by lowering down on a small, disintegrating floating platform? Well, guess what? That's the same method in which you respawn in Mario Bros.! That's where it came from! Ain't that another neat little homage?)

May Nintendo continue to pay tribute to Mario Bros., the arcade classic, and do all that it can to keep reminding everyone of the game's importance.