It’s the NES’s silver anniversary this month, yes, but it also happens to be the 25th birthday of Super Mario Bros., the game that arguably did more than any other NES title to ensure that Nintendo’s fledgling system would be a runaway success.
Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of SMB and a couple dozen other Nintendo titles you might be familiar with, sat down with Famitsu magazine in this week’s issue to share some behind-the-scenes development tales from the NES’s flagship title. Some of the highlights:
– Where did the concept for SMB come from, anyway? “It wasn’t an idea that just came out of the blue,” Miyamoto said. “It was the culmination of a variety of factors. First, we had a lot of technical know-how built up from games like Excitebike and Kung Fu. Second, the Disk System [a Japan-only attachment] was coming out shortly, so I wanted to make a game that would put a final exclamation point on that era of cartridge games. Third, I wanted to build upon our tradition of what we called ‘athletic games’ at the time — games where you controlled a guy and had to jump a lot to overcome obstacles. We felt strongly about how we were the first to come up with that genre, and it was a goal of ours to keep pushing it.”
