#but given the competition it’s not much a feat we got... the dad from frozen... Frollo... triton | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

adam16bit · 7 years

Photo

Super Mario Bros. 3

I just got through this one on the NES Classic, which afforded me something I could never do on the console version - actually play through every stage! As a kid you couldn’t exactly hog the TV for the hours it would take to play through every world, which is why things like Warp Whistles were incredibly useful. It’s obviously possible to beat this game in a couple of hours, but not unless you skip chunks of it or have beaten it before and generally know what you’re doing.

This was probably the best game the system had to offer in terms of variety and general vastness. There was no save or password system, but you could pick up a variety of items to use later (as needed) and I believe more and better power-ups than on any subsequent Mario game.

Marketing

They did a good job with this one - thanks to it coming out in Japan over a year before the USA, various import video game magazines probably made a fortune by picking up an import copy and posting screen shots. (See: GamePro #1, a freebie at Toys R Us that I got with Blaster Master.) Other publications advertising their product for free - or paying for the right to preview it - would be a remarkable feat for Nintendo, as there were countless unlicensed video game news magazines. But they realized they could go much, much bigger. They could manufacture a significantly larger phenomenon.

Nintendo got itself some fantastic product placement in The Wizard, a feature-length ad for video game stuff with a free mini Nintendo Power (”Pocket Power”) magazine with your ticket purchase. How or why my parents agreed to take me to see this is still a mystery given how few times we saw movies in the theaters - the somewhat insufferable movie did a great job showing us something that many of us to this day still don’t realize. The power of marketing to kids in the 1980s was utterly insane, and while many of us think back on kidvid like She-Ra, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and the like as good clean wholesome fun? It was there to sell us stuff. Even though The Wizard had elements of sports movies and road trip movies, it was basically a wish fulfillment fantasy - and that wish was for kids to see footage of a video game they couldn’t actually buy until next year. Given how long a few months seems when you’re a kid, this sort of thing really stirred up the frenzy even more, making the game scarce upon release in the USA in 1990.

The TV ads were similarly kind of creepy with a cultish atmosphere of an endless stream of kids chanting Mario’s name, waiting for their icon to arrive once more. But TV marketing didn’t stop there - there was also a rebranded Saturday morning TV show called “Super Mario Bros. 3″ that had musical numbers. Some are the stuff of pop culture legend, like Wendy O. Koopa kidnapping Milli Vanilli to play her birthday party. Others are more forgettable but more insidious - there’s a whole song and dance extolling the virtues of the Frog Suit power-up from the game. Looking back on it, it’s diabolical, creepy, and insanely effective.

But wait - there’s more! Nintendo Power magazine was famous for being a way to market to kids and charge them for the opt-in privilege. One issue of the magazine was completely devoted to Super Mario Bros. 3 - some may dismiss it as a strategy guide, but it was an ad. Full-color illustrations showing all of the fun stuff in the game could be dismissed as spoilery, but that wasn’t a term people used in 1990. You’d buy a game guide (like the Official Nintendo Player’s Guide) and use it sort of like how people used Leonard Maltin’s guide to the movies. There was no Internet, so these magazines were showing people what to play, rent, or purchase - and boy howdy did they help get kids to ask mom and dad to drop fifty bones on software that they could finish in a couple of weeks.

For your very brief political moment, you might say “that’s fine” or “shouldn’t there be laws preventing this kind of marketing to kids?” As someone in the toy business I’m both creeped out by it and a big part of it - my office is packed with toys and games dating back to my own childhood, and most of the new stuff I get is tied to marketing/programming/culture I experienced as a kid. I don’t buy Avatar, I buy Star Wars. There were indeed laws against carpet-bombing kids on TV with marketing, but comic books were largely fair game and Saturday morning TV changed from kid versions of adult shows and weird puppet entertainment to training wheels for the consumer vehicle of today. Show of hands - who here watched one or more Marvel-based TV show as a child 20, 30, or even 40 years ago and is now a fan of the movie franchise?

We’re in a weird place. I could go on a tear about how the cereal and magazine aisles in 1980s grocery stores served as my Internet but we’re on too big of a tangent here. Point being - SMB3 was a huge success because Nintendo heavily invested in that success. If you had any connection to their target demographic, they probably lobbed something at you and got your attention. It helped that the game was indeed everything they promised.

Believe the Mario Hype?

The first batch of NES games had a bunch of original-ish ideas. Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, and others would have one or more sequels on the 8-bit console, although all of them seemed to have an unwritten rule to “return to form” for their third entries. They were bigger and better, sure - but Mario gave us a completely different sequel before reverting back to a powered-up version of the original game. Link’s adventure diverted him into a Metroidvania/RPG hybrid before returning to the not-quite-RPG top-down adventure game format most of us know and love. Castlevania, too, introduced and removed RPG elements to return to the classic block stage format.

Mario’s levels were very similar to the first game, but larger. On the whole you always moved left to right, there was no warping from the right to the left of the screen, but you could go up into the sky by flight or climbing a vine. Auto-scrolling levels were introduced to mix up the dynamic. A map screen allowed you limited control of how you advanced - some levels and challenges were wholly optional, and certain items like Jugem’s Cloud actually allowed you to skip over some of those challenges. In the original Super Mario Bros., your options were to go to the right side of the screen and maybe select a Warp Zone. By the third game, you could choose to assault a fortress, or hop in a Mushroom House to take a power-up, or blow a Warp Whistle when you so decided.

The world was covered in familiar, more modernized versions of faces you’ve seen before with only Bob-Omb returning from the second game. Pretty much the entire cast of the first game came back with prettier sprites, and Mario also got a facelift - not as good as his look in the second game, but his controls were tighter and his pants were, for some reason, blacker.

Power-ups are what really made the game special. A lot of gamers would say Super Mario World from the Super NES was an inferior game, and I’d almost agree. In the 16-bit Mario, you could have fireballs or don a cape and fly. Super Mario Bros. 3 let you get a raccoon tail, fireballs, a Hammer Bros. suit, a Frog Suit, a Tanooki Suit, and the P-Wing which granted infinite flight on a single stage without having to take a running start first. You had options.

Clever enemies - some of which you only met once or twice - included a Goomba jumping around in a giant green shoe, reptiles who would barf up a spiked ball and chuck it at your head, and spiny eggs that would sometimes refuse to hatch. Even the sun itself bore an angry face and would chase you down through the desert! Squids would send their children after you in the seas to bring you down! What did you ever do to them? Oh, right. Calamari.

A World of Difference

One of the things that set Mario games apart from the competition were its themed worlds - “Grass Land” and a desert don’t seem too thrilling, but they were fun. The ice level in this game got clever with frozen bonus items - if you wanted coins, you had to hit them with a fire ball to thaw them out. One world was filled with pipes and man-eating vegetation. Another world - easily the best in the entire series - was Big Island, where you were normal size and most of the enemies were actual giants! I wish they would bring more of that back in the 2D series, which has gone from evolving from game to game to basically being the same thing since New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS. Not bad - but the level of change between each of the Super Mario Bros. games released over 5 years is pretty staggering.

Because of these differences, the game really made you make decisions. Do you skip ahead to world 8 to beat the game and watch the brief, credits-free ending again? Or do you go hang out in World 4 again because World 4 was awesome? Do you use those awesome power-ups you found in a Mushroom House now, or save them for later when you might actually need them? It’s a heck of a lot more to consider than “run to the right, and try not to die.”

I found that the game held up very well to a replay - there were some weird glitches where sometimes an item would hit me and I didn’t die, and others where it didn’t hit me and I did die, but I assume this is emulation bug stuff or something I just lucked in to this time. Levels were significantly shorter than I remembered, lacking the extensive obstacles and obliterating any replay value (per game, that is) as you’re locked out of a stage once you beat it. Nintendo didn’t really start experimenting with forced replay of Mario stages to get all the exits and to find all the secrets until Super Mario World, and then in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine the game was more about replay, replay, replay. The levels were bigger, there was more you could do, the games were prettier, but you also were treading the same ground repeatedly. Super Mario Bros. 3 didn’t make you replay anything until you got a “Game Over” screen.

Very few games had the marketing impact of Mario’s final NES adventure, but Acclaim and Sega did learn a lot from the hype Nintendo created with “Mortal Monday” for Mortal Kombat and “Sonic 2sday” for the second Sonic the Hedgehog title - and people showed up. We saw a lot of this throughout the 1990s, with the first “midnight madness” event for an action figure launch in 1999 for The Phantom Menace, and the film would really kick off the ghastly trend of day- or week-long “line parties.” Now people just reserve their seat online, but back then it wasn’t uncommon to see the cinema briefly transformed into an experience not unlike tailgating at a football game.

The game was a smash hit, which you know - the NES cartridge sold millions of copies. It would go on to be a pack-in game with the NES. They upgraded it to 16-bit graphics and sound as part of Super Mario All-Stars. The upgraded port would be sold separately - at full price - on the GameBoy Advance a decade later. That’s a lot of money for old software, and Nintendo has trotted it out as a download for the Wii and Wii U for about five bones. I don’t doubt it will also be on the switch. Heck, Super Mario All-Stars also got a $20 Wii port. The best value for this game is on the NES Classic Edition from late 2016, which I just played through, because each game averages $2 plus you get the game hardware. I still am somewhat shocked how cheap (for Nintendo) the whole package was, as the Mario games alone are so fondly remembered I bet they could’ve got $60 for just those titles. I still enjoy the games - the marketing worked, I watched the stupid cartoons too, and I’ve got a 20-inch Mario action figure waving to me from the other side of my office as I type this. Is this a good thing? Is it terrible? You tell me.

#super mario bros.#super mario bros. 3 #nes classic edition #video games #nintendo

3 notes · View notes