The Super Mario Bros. 16-Bit Remake is Soulless
Justice for mangled Princess Toadstool
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The original Super Mario Bros. on the Famicom/NES has a singular visual language. In a word? Crude. Mario, Bowser, Princess Toadstool, the enemies and the backgrounds are chunky, blocky, pixelated works of art. The characters don't resemble their modern counterparts in the slightest, and that’s a wonderful thing. This crudeness gives the game its identity.
Mario has never looked more like a blue-collar workhorse. Bowser (or King Koopa) resembles a kabuki demon lizard from hell. And Toadstool... poor Toadstool.1
Menacing Goombas and Koopa Troopas move rigidly along the rough brick and grass. The clouds, bushes, and green mountains look like they belong in a five-year-old’s diorama. They're all so wretchedly beautiful. They have soul. No NES game – not even the dozens of Mario clones out there – pulled off this particular aesthetic like the original Super Mario Bros.
We all know the rest of the story. Super Mario Bros. and the franchise it birthed became some of the most popular games of all time. Millions of young gamers loved the worlds that Nintendo created. Then in 1993, something unthinkable happened. Nintendo released Super Mario All-Stars, a visual reimagining of the NES trilogy, along with the previously unreleased-in-America, Super Mario Bros. 2 or Lost Levels. Nintendo pulled a Lucas with their beloved Mario games. Except instead of the typical backlash that happens when Lucas changes the Star Wars Trilogy for the 47th time, gamers loved it. The gaming press loved it. Super Mario All-Stars was hailed as a great value, a collection that reinvigorated Nintendo's older Mario games. Even recently, when Nintendo released the compilation on the SNES Switch Online platform, Mario fans both young and old took to social media to sing Nintendo's praises.
Super Mario All-Stars is a great value – four Mario games in one cartridge, c'mon – and Super Mario Bros 2 and 3 do benefit from additional colors and fleshed-out landscapes. Super Mario Bros. does not.
The game's graphics are polished to a smooth, shiny sheen. As a result, the Mushroom Kingdom and its inhabitants lack all of the grit and edge of the original. Despite each stage having the same enemies and obstacles as before, the game overall feels safer, brighter, and happier with little threat of danger. Mario somehow controls heavier and more slippery than he does in the NES version. Every element – Mario, Bowser, Toadstool, the enemies, bricks, power-ups, etc – is where it should be, and yet, the game never feels quite right. Like you're playing a Super Mario Bros. impostor instead of the real deal.
SPECIFIC VISUAL GRIEVANCES
The twinkling colorful stars in the night stages. The pitch-black backgrounds from the NES are far more immersive and foreboding.
Bowser's goofy self-portraits in the background of his castles. Is this the beginning of Nintendo making Bowser more of a silly character?
Mario's sprite looks more like the befuddled mascot he became, rather than the rough-and-tumble Brooklyn plumber he once was. I understand this change. I also hate it.
Mario smiling and making the peace sign at you every time you enter a bonus pipe. The new absurdly chipper music is grating as well.
World 6-3 is now just a night time forest stage instead of the eerie white forest found in the NES.
That said, not all of the visual changes are garbage.
VISUAL DIFFERENCES THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The bizarre Goomba statues in the background of the bridge stages. Finally, Goombas get their due!
Worlds 3-1 and 3-2 are covered in snow. The white snow contrasts well with the (relatively) dark backgrounds.
The Toads emerging from the sack after the end of every castle. You never know what those little guys are gonna do!
Nintendo has re-released the original Super Mario Bros. more times than just about any other game in their back catalog. You can play the game on the NES, the SNES (in All-Stars), the Game Boy Color (as a standalone cart), Game Boy Advance (as a standalone cart), the Gamecube (via the Game Boy Player, but you can also hack Animal Crossing), the Wii, the 3DS, the Wii U, and the Switch.
You know how many times Nintendo has re-released 16-bit Super Mario Bros. outside of Super Mario All-Stars? Zero.
Nintendo knows. The original Super Mario Bros. for the NES is the better version of the two. Like the original “Star Wars,” its visual style is iconic and timeless, ancient and otherworldly. No games look like Super Mario Bros. today. None would even dare. The SNES version, on the other hand, looks like a myriad of other SNES games. It's clean, sterile, and dare I write, pretty.
Like the “Star Wars” Special Edition, it completely misses the point.
*image on the right courtesy of Youtube channel Carls493
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Peach for all the younger generations
All-Stars is definitely a great value, especially the revision that includes Super Mario World on the same cart. If you got this bundled with your SNES, you had hours of entertainment ahead of you. Mario 2 (USA) I think benefits from the visual makeover if only to distance itself further from its Doki Doki Panic roots. Mario 3 is very much like a next Gen remaster that’s pretty popular these days, adding a much needed save feature too.
But yeah there’s something off about redoing Mario 1 this way. The low fi first gen NES graphics (combined with the matching simple gameplay) are definitely part of its appeal. I guess that’s why this version never had a standalone release on the GBA unlike the other games. Even back then I preferred the NES version (although not having an NES, this is the main way I enjoyed all the original SMB games). And I think I wished you could play the NES versions of the game on the collection as well. If I go back to Mario 1 it’s Al way to the NES original.
Still I do appreciate the effort put into All-Stars. It’s more than Tecmo put into Ninja Gaiden Trilogy and Nintendo themselves put into 3D All-Stars for Switch.
“Specific visual grievances” is a phrase I am desperate to use on my own one day. Another great article.