Super Mario Bros. tells a story. It’s not a very complicated story — Mario saves the princess from an overgrown turtle — but it’s a story nonetheless. And the game embellishes that story through small details. For instance, after liberating the castle of the second world and the illusory Bowser within, Mario resumes his quest […]

World 2-3 continues the trend established by the previous two stages: Paralleling the design of Worlds 1-1 through 1-4, but in a sideways manner that goes beyond mere cyclical repetition. And in a way that makes sense, too. Just as World 2-2’s journey underwater echoed World 1-2’s descent underground but played out in a completely […]

Lest you think Super Mario Bros. will be content to simply cycle through variants on the first four stages over and over again until you reach the end, World 2-2 demonstrates that this is not the case at all. Yeah, it begins with a little cutscene of Mario leaving a fortress and taking a pipe […]

With World 2-2, Super Mario Bros. officially breaks from the standard cycle of previous Mario games. Rather than cycling back through the previous four levels after conquering them, the hero moves on to new and bigger challenges. The classic arcade level-cycle approach still holds some vestigial sway here, as the subsequent seven worlds do generally […]

Do you get the impression that Super Mario Bros.‘s levels are somehow getting smaller? Ah, well, that’s because they are. World 1-4 is the briefest level yet, clocking in at a couple of screens shorter than 1-3, which in turn was shorter than the stages that preceded it as well. But it makes sense: This […]

Once Mario automatically descends the pipe beyond the first fortress, World 1-2 begins in earnest. It brings about a significant change in setting: Mario goes underground, leaving behind the blue skies and calliope music of World 1-1 in favor of gloom. In fact, the blue-tinted Goombas who live down here have retroactively been renamed “Gloombas,” […]

The funny thing about Super Mario Bros.: After conquering World 1-1 — which really only takes a few minutes of your time — Mario marches past the flag pole to the fortress stationed at the end of the World. And then, once World 1-2 begins… he keeps right on marching. Instead of fighting through the […]

Something that truly impresses me about World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is that it gives you a taste of just about everything Mario can do. Short of swimming and climbing vines, his entire repertoire is contained here. And yet, the game doesn’t feel like it’s tipped its hand once you get to the flagpole […]

If the month-and-a-half gap between Parts IX and X of The Anatomy of Super Mario gave you the impression I was procrastinating… well, it’s because I was. This first stage of Super Mario Bros. may well be the single most analyzed and written-about stage of any video game in the medium’s history. Countless critics have […]

Editor’s Note: The best way to read this series is to go page-by-page through the site index. Or you can grab the entire series in print from Amazon.com… You know what makes a game great? Well, lots of things can make a game great. But a really good place to start is when that game offers you […]