How Super Mario Saved the Video Game Industry

In the mid-1980s, Super Mario Bros., considered by many as one of the greatest video games in history, came into fruition. This was after Nintendo hoped to follow up the success of Mario Bros., an arcade game released in 1983 around the time the video game industry suffered what has become known as the video game crash, or, in Japan, the Atari crash, of 1983.

The crash happened due to a few factors, but mainly because of the amount of video games and consoles available on the market. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, almost every electronics company in Japan were designing video games. Personal computers were also gaining popularity at this time, which saw the video gaming industry suffer in sales. 

The crash, though “largely based in North America since the majority of consoles and games were produced by US companies, also had repercussions in Europe and Asia because these countries were dependent on the US markets for this emerging medium,” says Jennifer deWinter, professor of arts, communications and humanities at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

“US historians are by and large in agreement about the cause. The market was saturated with different consoles – tyranny of choice – leading consumers to be confused at times... the glut of games led to two significant problems: too many games from small companies trying to make it in this speculative market and, simply put, bad games that destroyed the reputation of the consoles.”

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In the United States, the crash was also partially based on a general moral panic. It was believed unfit for children to spend so much time in arcade halls playing violent games. “This part of the game industry shaped a social ideology that accompanied the console crash,” says deWinter.

But the crash also brought on something wonderful: the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America in 1985 and in Europe in 1987. “The industry was going to get out of the crash regardless, but the success of Nintendo was timing and a business plan based on previous failures of their competition.”

The technical console Famicom was released in Japan in 1983, and the NES was a remodeled version of it, developed for the American and European markets. With the NES, Nintendo was hoping to awaken the slumbering video game industry. But in order to do that, they needed games to play on the console. 

The Super Mario Bros. on NES became hugely popular. To date, the original game has sold more than 40 million physical copies around the world, while all Mario games combined have sold 310 million copies worldwide. Anyone born before the 2000s would have no trouble recognizing Koji Kondo’s now-legendary music for the game, or the sound effects of Mario and all the other characters, as well as the side-scrolling layout of the game.  

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The character of Mario originally appeared not in his own game, but as a playable character known as Mr. Video and subsequently Jumpman (the game was the first ever to include jumping) in the original Donkey Kong arcade platform game. In this early iteration, Mario was a carpenter, not a plumber.

The president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the same president who first discovered Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the revolutionary handheld console Game & Watch, assigned the game design to the then-unknown Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto later went on to design both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda simultaneously, two of the most popular and influential games Nintendo has ever released.

Miyamoto and Yokoi worked together on a number of games and together they are probably the most important figures of the golden age of video games. The influence of cartoons and classic damsels in distress are themes prominent in most of the earlier platform video games, including Super Mario Bros. 

As with many other games and consoles, Super Mario Bros. products are sought after collectibles, ranging from those earliest arcade games to more modern examples. Kestrel Lee has been collecting video games since 2004, and is a part of the Nintendo Game & Watch Trading Community on Facebook. “Since I started collecting I’ve noticed two things: retro gaming is coming back as a major trend for remakes, and it’s becoming a viable investment. Prices for games in New Old Stock condition (NOS) are rapidly increasing, and with the Mario Bros. games, which is obviously a collector favorite, this is the case too.”

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Barnebys: What are your most precious items?

Lee: “When it comes to Mario Bros., my rarer items are Dutch promotion edition Mario Bros. A fellow collector, Anthony Lavenu, created a custom-designed box for me as I only have the game without its original box and paperwork. I also really love my NOS Pocketsize edition Mario Bros. Game & Watch, which was sold only in North America. My collection also has a rare Duracel promotion edition Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch Mini Classic, which was sold in Germany.”

Is there a Super Marios Bros. holy grail?

“To Game & Watch as well as Mr. Diskun or Famicom collectors, the most valuable Mario Bros. game is the Game & Watch Super Mario Bros. boxed set. Supposedly only 10,000 were made and given as a gift, and are highly valued by Game & Watch collectors as well as Famicom and Mr. Diskun collectors. It goes for over $1,000 easily, even with incomplete paperwork.”

What are the most valuable games on the market right now? And why are they valuable?

“For Game & Watch collectors, the most valuable Game & Watch game is this Pocketsize edition Mario Bros. Game & Watch. The North American edition is most rare, particularly as New Old Stock or even better if it’s still sealed in the original blisterpack.”

After 35 years, Mario is a truly lovable character. Games are still being made about the Italian plumber rescuing damsels in distress in a world of mushrooms, and there has been at least one Mario game for each console Nintendo has put out since the inception of Mario. 

“Mario is appealing because he was designed as a character to move through a playground full of adventure, jumping, sliding, exploration, and hidden portals. Game design is about experience design, so the experience of the worlds of Mario through Mario is the experience of childlike joy, physicality, and imagination,” says deWinter. 

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Lee also explains that “Moving away from its toy and console background, Mario helped mark Nintendo’s foray into the app space, when Super Mario Run became Nintendo’s first gaming app on iPhone in 2019. Eventually Mario Kart Tour became the iPhone’s most downloaded game app in 2019.”

“On the consumer side,” says deWinter, “we have now seen the generational turnover of people who played Mario and Nintendo as children, and now have children of their own and want to pass on and share their own experiences. Mario is one of the few franchises that enables this generational play, both through newly released games but also through the release of ‘classic platforms’. Mario is still a family game, and many of the designs around Mario are to bring people together in person. We can see this in the advertisements – like grandparents playing with children – and in testimonies.”

Interestingly, a North American study in 1990,  as reported by James Coates in The Chicago Tribune (18 May, 1993), concluded that more children in the United States were familiar with Mario than Mickey Mouse. Which means Nintendo must have done something right.

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