After More than 30 Years, I Beat Super Mario Bros. for the First Time

Play Log #1: Super Mario Bros.
Game completed on: 12/27/24

Call me a fake gamer, but I realized earlier this year that I’d never actually beaten the original Super Mario Brothers. 

I know the game almost like the back of my hand, having poured the requisite hours into it as a gamer kid growing up in the 80s and 90s. And I’ve revisited it every few years as an adult, either by playing through the vanilla game in Virtual Console form, or via Nintendo’s excellent nostalgia remixes like NES Remix and Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Heck, over 10 years ago (yeesh) I headed up IGN’s Top 125 Nintendo Games project in which we named Mario 1 the best Nintendo game ever made.

I know the music, the warp zones, the vines up to the cloud kingdom (and the vine dance), the infinite lives tricks.

So yeah. I know the game.

But… had I actually beaten the final castle in level 8-4? Had I managed to rescue the princess from Bowser’s clutches, instead of finding out yet again she was at another castle? Sadly, no.

In my defense, Super Mario Brothers’ final level, and the final world in general, are no joke on the NES. We’ll come back to Mario 1’s overall difficulty in a moment. What truly stopped me from beating Mario back in the day, as a young kid still learning how video games worked, was the maze in Mario 1’s final level.

That damn maze.

The Maze

Unlike (almost*) every other level in Mario 1 – and there’s 32 of them – its final stage has a trick up its sleeve. To win you can’t just run right, dodging fireballs and Koopas along the way. If you try, the final level will just loop you back to the beginning, forcing you to endlessly repeat the same section of the level over and over.

To progress you have to descend down the final level’s pipes in the right order. Pick the wrong pipe, and it too will send you back to the start of the stage. 

The truth is that level 8-4 isn’t really all that hard. You pretty quickly figure out something is amiss. It cleverly lays itself out in a distinctive way so rather than thinking that the stage is just really (really) long, you realize “hey… I’ve seen that section of bricks before.” After a little experimentation you figure out that some pipes let you progress, while others send you back. So it becomes a memory game – recalling that you must first go down pipe 2, then 4, and so-on, to break Mario out of the time loop. The level path itself is also part of the maze – you’ll get looped back for taking the wrong low/medium/high pathway through the stage. Not too tricky, but still takes a bit to figure out what’s going on.

But playing as a kid, and playing on an NES, where losing your lives meant starting the entire game over (!!!), the stakes and pressure once you made it back to 8-4 felt almost insurmountable. Remember there was no internet back then so no one knew that Mario 1 did in fact have a Continue option. This is more widely-known now, but I am guessing there will be at least a couple 40-something gamers having their mind blown by this revelation if they missed it the last few times it circulated the web, just as it blew my adult mind when I first found out several years back. So you could technically start back over at 8-1, de-risking Mario 1 bit. But most kids all over the world didn’t know about the option to continue – we all thought we had to start the whole game over.

So, you’d spend 30 minutes making it back to 8-4, if you made it there at all. You would probably be on your last life or two by then. You’d be trying to remember which pipe was which, or if you were a particularly resourceful kid you’d now be referencing your hurriedly-written notes you jotted down on a piece of notebook paper. You hoped that if you did finally make it through, you weren’t small Mario, so you had a fighting chance to get past Bowser and win once you knew the secret of the maze.

As a kid with limited gaming time, I pretty quickly decided that said time was better spent beating up the Foot Clan in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or racing around in Excite Bike or R.C. Pro-Am. And once I got a Sega Genesis with Sonic, my chances of beating Mario 1 were over. 

* World 7-4 also has a similar, shorter and more simplistic looping maze section, presumably to help tutorialize and prepare gamers for what was to come.

Finally Rescuing the Princess

Over my holiday break I resolved to beat Mario 1, well over 30 years after I first played it. As I mentioned, I knew the game really well. I knew in advance that the maze, which felt so insurmountable as a kid, wouldn’t actually be that hard, and would just be about picking a few correct pipes and would be over in moments. And I knew that playing with modern features like save states and rewinds would sand down the difficulty that was so prevelant in 8-bit games from the 80s.

I told my wife I wanted to beat Mario 1 over the holidays. The next evening I sat down and did it in one sitting. I think it probably took about a half hour.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“That’s it.” I replied.

With little fanfare, the princess was rescued and Super Mario Bros.’s second quest began. I declined to continue through it, although I may elect to complete it at some point in the future, too.

I no longer have the patience (and quite possibly the skill) to replay the games of my youth as I originally played them. But nor did I want to completely trivialize my Mario 1 run-through by overly abusing modern features. With save states and rewinds you could save after every jump, after every defeated Hammer Bros. if you wanted to, inching your way through the entire game. 

I elected for a compromise. I saved the game after every level, resolving to beat each individual level in one go. If I died halfway through, I reverted to that beginning-of-level save, to let me try it again from the start. By the final few worlds it was taking multiple attempts to beat most levels, but it never felt close to insurmountable. It was a sobering thought to remember that, if I were truly playing the game as I did as a kid, every three or so deaths would mean a trip back to the start and back to level 1-1.

So, the princess (not yet named Princess Peach) got rescued, and I could finally put Mario 1 onto my “beaten” pile. With an asterisk next to it, but that’s fine with me.

Observations

A few stray thoughts from my time running through the game – 

• When looked at with fresh eyes, Mario 1’s secrets really do feel revolutionary and avant garde. I think they don’t get enough credit for establishing some of video games’ key tenets – namely that these are games and the rules they establish and impose upon the player are meant to be questioned and broken by the player. Mario 1 makes a statement that the fourth wall in this still-new entertainment medium will be flimsier than it is in other forms of fiction. Plenty of earlier games had secrets and easter eggs, but Mario 1’s hidden 1ups, vines, and warp zones permeate the entire play experience, and encourage exploration, experimentation, and the idea that this world can be more than it seems. You’re taught to poke and prod everything – an attitude that persists in gaming to this day.
  
• The underground warp zones in particular are notable. You access them by breaking out of the understood gameplay area, thereby breaking into the zone where Mario’s score, lives, and other meta-game, “only there for the player’s benefit” information is displayed. It feels incredibly ahead of its time. An analogy would be a mystery book making use of its copyright page or bar code as part of the in-story puzzle. Until a player makes their way up there, it surely doesn’t even cross their mind that the area could be used for a gameplay purpose. I don’t think it’s a stretch to guess that many thousands of now-adult video game fans got hooked on the hobby by learning as a kid “oh I can go up there??” for the first time, stretching their brains just that tiny bit. It doesn’t feel like anything special now, but looked at with fresh eyes, it’s easy to see how it would have felt wondrous in the 1980s. 
  
• Mario 1 to this day feels great to play. This 40-year-old game has better-feeling running and jumping than many 2D games that are released now. It still has the juice. Mario’s acceleration, the arc of his jump, skidding to a stop with some preserved momentum – it’s still extremely joyful, satisfying, and intuitive. This game broke out and established Nintendo’s billion-dollar entertainment empire for good reason.
  
• I’ve been playing video games my entire life, but by playing Mario 1 the way I did, with a save state at the start of each level, I clearly felt pressed by the game’s difficulty. My palms were definitely sweaty by about the middle of World 7 until the end. It’s engrossing, commanding your full attention. It provides an (I’ll say it again) ahead-of-its-time gameplay difficulty curve, forcing players to build on their skills throughout. It is far from the legendary difficulty of many other NES “classics” – it’s never unreasonable – with the possible exception of those goddamn Hammer Bros. you meet on flat ground in World 8. The difficulty level felt nearly perfect – you’ll be tested, but you know you can persevere. It’s accessible, but demanding.