What it was
Super Mario Bros. 3 is a side-scrolling platformer in eight themed worlds: grassland, desert, sea, a land of giants, the sky, ice, pipes and Bowser's dark country. For the first time in the series you move across an overworld map between stages, with bonus houses, roaming Hammer Brothers and airships waiting at the end of each world.
The headline is the suits. The Super Leaf gives Mario a raccoon tail to fly with; the Frog Suit makes water levels easy and dry land awkward; the Tanooki Suit turns him into a statue; the Hammer Suit throws hammers. Each one changes how a stage plays, and stages are built to show that off.
Where it sits in history
Nintendo released it in Japan in October 1988, in North America in February 1990 and in Europe in 1991. By the time it reached the West the NES was five years old and the Super Famicom was about to launch in Japan, and it still looked like the machine had a lot left.
In the United States it was trailed by The Wizard, a 1989 film that ends at a video game tournament where the final round is the first public look at the game. That made it one of the most anticipated cartridges of its era, and it went on to become one of the best-selling games ever released on the console.
How it plays today
Very well. The controls are tight, the jumps are readable, and the level design teaches through play rather than text. Most stages last a couple of minutes, which suits short sessions, and the map lets you skip ahead with warp whistles if you know where they are.
The parts that show their age are small: no battery save on the original cartridge, so a full run is one sitting or a warp-whistle shortcut, and a handful of late stages lean on memorisation. Play a re-release with save states and those go away.
Compared with
- Super Mario Bros.: The original is the blueprint; this is the finished building, with a map, suits and far more variety per world.
- Super Mario World: The SNES follow-up is bigger and gentler, with Yoshi and a cape that flies further. SMB3 is tighter and harder.
- Super Mario Bros. 2: The Western sequel plays like a different game because it was one. SMB3 is the return to what the series became.
Why it matters
Watch someone play Super Mario Bros. 3 well and their face goes still. The jumps are readable, stages last a couple of minutes, and a new suit changes the rules just often enough to keep you reaching. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this flow: absorption when challenge matches skill, with clear goals and immediate feedback. Self-consciousness drops away and time distorts. Super Mario Bros. 3 may be the best 8-bit teacher of it, because it teaches through play rather than text.
Plenty of Western players first met that state in front of this cartridge in 1990, some having glimpsed it at the end of The Wizard. No battery save meant a full run happened in one sitting, and whole afternoons went with it. Here flow was not a rare peak. It was ordinary, domestic and shared: one person flying a raccoon tail over a level while someone on the couch said go left, no, left.
Read: The zone: why good games make time disappear →
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Verdict · 10/10
The high point of 8-bit platforming and the template for most Mario games since. If you only play one NES game, play this.
