A to Z Challenge: It's-a him, Mario!

 Mario became a symbol of Nintendo and the video game industry in general after pretty humble beginnings in Donkey Kong.  In that game for the Atari 2600 and arcade, you had to guide the blobby Mario up ladders to rescue the princess from the giant gorilla, who in no way was like a donkey.  Along the way you jump over barrels or smash them with a hammer.  It was the kind of game that just kept going and getting more complicated.  Maybe at some point you did actually win.

In Donkey Kong Jr., Mario is actually the villain holding Donkey Kong captive while his son has to rescue him.  There was also a regular Mario Bros game where you did...stuff.  I think they made that for the Atari 2600 but we didn't have it.  That was probably the game that introduced Luigi and maybe that they were plumbers.  So you had a good chunk of the Mario mythos established!

When the NES console came out in the mid-80s, Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt were the games that usually game with it.  This time instead of Donkey Kong, Mario and his brother Luigi battle Koopa, who has taken the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom.  You have to jump on or over enemies like "goombas" or turtles and avoid the spiny bad guys and bullets.  You got two upgrades from hitting special ? bricks with your head.  First a mushroom would make Mario/Luigi grow.  Once at full-size another brick would have a flame flower that allowed you to launch fireballs.  Those were helpful against a lot of enemies but not beetles or bullets.

The game had 8 "worlds" each with 4 levels, the last of which was always a special castle where you'd have to jump over a Koopa only to find that "Our princess is in another castle" until of course the last level.  But you don't have to play all 32 levels; you can beat the game by playing only 1/4 of that.  You play 1-1 and then in 1-2 there's a "warp zone" that lets you jump to 4-1.  Then in 4-2 there's another warp zone to 8-1.  From there you have to play through to the end.  

Worlds 2-2 and 7-2 are underwater levels that can be tricky because the water really hampers your ability to move around; it's almost better to be small so you're more agile.  2-3 and 7-3 then you have to run like crazy as flying fish come at you from above and below and you can't really kill them easily.  The third level on a lot of worlds are jumping levels where you have to jump from trees to platforms and stuff.  Those are always a little nerve-wracking as there is no room for error.  Miss something and you fall to your death to probably go splat.  To amp up the difficulty, a couple of these also have bullets flying by.  With the bullets or flames in the castle levels, the problem is you can hear them launch but by the time you see them you might be in mid-jump with no way to correct before you get hit.

The game was (and still is) hugely popular.  On the knockoff Gameboy and knockoff SNES I have, there are versions of Super Mario where someone puts in different characters or different enemies, sort of like the Doom WADs I made in the 90s.

Super Mario 2 then was a really weird game that didn't use much of the gameplay from the first game.  You throw turnips and stuff and...whatever.  It was a bizarre Japanese import that most American players didn't really like because we were expecting something more like the first game.

Raccoons are known for their flying, right?

Around 1988 or 89, they made Super Mario Bros 3, which was far more like the first game.  The gameplay is largely the same, but expanded so you could get the fireball suit but more often a feather that gave you a raccoon tail to let you fly.  In the aquatic levels you could get a frog suit to swim better.  And there were "P Wings" that let you fly a lot longer and higher than the tail.  There were also minigames like matching cards or lining up three objects or just picking from treasure chests.  These things gave you extra lives or spare mushrooms, tails, and so on that you could use.

We didn't have an NES for a while and didn't have Mario 3, though I think we might have rented it a few times.  And on my knockoff Gameboy I've played it, though I keep getting stuck on the pyramid in World 2 because I don't think the controls work all that great for what you need to do, which is throw beetles around to break bricks.

In the cheesy product placement movie The Wizard, Super Mario Bros 3 is the final game played in the "Video Armageddon" tournament.  And as the Rifftrax points out, it's funny how the one player's brother and friend are shouting tips for a game they've never played.

In 1993 there was also a super-cheesy Super Mario Bros live action movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi and Dennis Hopper as Koopa.  The movie is pretty much nothing like the video games.  One time I watched the Rifftrax and then thought about what they could have done differently.  The thing is, I don't think a live action movie could have worked back then especially.  With CGI still in its infancy and really expensive, they'd have needed a budget like Waterworld or Titanic to make it and it still probably would have sucked.  Even now it was a lot smarter to go the animated route than trying to work live action into it.

The 2023 animated movie was obviously better, though I didn't think it was really great.  It did make a ton of money, so I'm sure there will be a sequel at some point.  That movie featured Easter eggs from pretty much all the games featuring Mario and Donkey Kong.

Besides the Super Mario Bros games, there were also games featuring Mario like Dr. Mario and Mario Paint.  When the SNES came out, there was a new game called Super Mario World.  Unfortunately I never had that one because I got the basic SNES that didn't come with that included.  I think I got the most basic one that didn't have any game included.  There was also Mario Kart that let you race around in go-carts with characters from Mario games.

I think then there was another new Mario game for the N64 along with spinoffs for Luigi and Yoshi.  And that continued with the Wii, Wii U, and Switch.  Plus the Gameboy.  For the Wii you could get the original Mario games to play on it, but I never bought that.

Anyway, as I said, Mario has become the symbol for Nintendo and largely for video games in general.  He's basically the Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny of gaming.  (Maybe he's Bugs and Pac-Man is Mickey?)  Even the music from the original Super Mario game has become iconic; I have an MP3 of a version recorded by the London Philharmonic.  Not bad for a plumber from the Bronx.