Games › Famicom Disk System › 1986
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1986 · Famicom Disk System
Same look, same sounds, same goal as Super Mario Bros.: run right, rescue the princess from Bowser. Then the first poison mushroom rolls towards you, a power-up that shrinks or kills you, and it is clear this is a different kind of game. Warp pipes can send you backwards. Gusts of wind push you mid-jump. Some jumps need blocks you cannot see, and others demand split-second timing.
There is no two-player mode, but you choose Mario or Luigi at the start, and for the first time they play differently. Luigi jumps higher and slides further, slow to speed up and slow to stop; Mario is quicker and more grounded. There are 32 levels across eight worlds, plus a hidden World 9 for players who never warp, and more bonus worlds for those who finish it eight times.
Nintendo R&D4 built it in about four months in early 1986, with Takashi Tezuka directing his first game while Shigeru Miyamoto was busy with The Legend of Zelda. Some of its levels began life in the arcade Vs. Super Mario Bros. Tezuka reasoned that Japanese players had mastered the first game and wanted something harder. The box said For Super Players, and TV ads showed people screaming at their screens.
It came out on the Famicom Disk System on 3 June 1986 and sold about 2.5 million copies, the system's best-seller. Nintendo of America's Howard Phillips judged it unfairly hard, so the West got a reworked Doki Doki Panic as its Super Mario Bros. 2 instead. This one first left Japan in 1993, renamed The Lost Levels, inside Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES.
If you know Super Mario Bros. well, it is a thrill. The designers clearly enjoyed turning your habits against you: the pipe you would always take, the jump you would always make, the block you would always hit. Luigi's floaty physics add a second way to play, and watching a skilled speedrunner get through it is a joy. It is a direct ancestor of the brutal fan-made Kaizo levels.
For everyone else it can feel mean. Invisible blocks, wind and poison mushrooms punish curiosity rather than skill, the physics are the same stiff ones from 1985, and later worlds demand trial and error. It is best seen as an expert's expansion to the original rather than a sequel in its own right. Play it with save states, or on All-Stars with its extra checkpoints, and it becomes a fun, fiendish puzzle.
The box said For Super Players, and the TV ads showed people screaming at their screens. Nintendo sold this game on its own cruelty. The poison mushroom, the wind, the pipe that sends you backwards: Takashi Tezuka's team took everything players had learned in Super Mario Bros. and turned it into a trap.
Bernard Suits defined playing a game as 'the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles'. This is the voluntary part at full volume. Nobody had to buy a harder Mario. Jesper Juul adds the paradox: we avoid failing in life yet seek it out in games, and failure makes us reconsider and improve. Every death here is a small lesson about your own habits, delivered with a grin. Its descendants are the fan-made Kaizo levels, built by people who loved the pain enough to share it. A strange kind of generosity, and a very human one.
Read: One must imagine Mario happy →
Verdict · 7/10
A fiendish expert's sequel that is part tribute and part trap. Brilliant for Mario veterans; everyone else should play the original first.
