Playing and discussing Mario games in chronological order with whomever wants to

I've decided to start playing all Mario games (that I feel like playing) in chronological order and talk about them. Feel free to give your own opinions or talk about how much better you would be at them.

So of course, I'm starting with the original 1981 Donkey Kong.


The second stage of the game.

Well, not the original original - I don't have an arcade cabinet.

But you can kind of see why the game became so popular. Moving platforms, obstacles, pick-ups, power-ups, enemies, three different stages... it's a lot for a game that launched only a year after Pac Man. Of course, the movement is a bit heavy. It's one of those games where, once you commit to an action, you cannot abort until the animation is done. Mario, despite not being Mario yet, but Jumpman, cannot really jump that high. It's realistic - the jumps are low, you cannot switch direction mid-jump and falling from more than a few meters loses you a life. Once you save Pauline at the end of the third stage, the next level (and every subsequent level until the game crashes) is comprised of the same three stages, but sped up.

But what I really find interesting is the art style and cultural references. It's a damsel in distress big primate story inspired by 1933's King Kong and 1930s' Popeye cartoons. Mario dodges barrels and has a comically-sized 1930s cartoon mallet. And of course! The game was made in 1981. At the time I'm writing this, Donkey Kong is as close to those 1930s references as it is to the modern day. It's a video game from before video games. It genuinely feels like it came out of a retro-futuristic universe where video games were invented before WW2.

I got to the second stage of the third level and got a score of 42600. I invite anyone to play this game, inevitably get a higher score, and brag about it here. From here on, I'll consider Donkey Kong its own series, so the next game I will play will NOT be Donkey Kong 2 or Donkey Kong Jr.

Is the next game to discuss the Mario Bros. arcade game? Because I can tell you that commercial Nintendo made for it is like a fever dream.

LuigiFan24 said:

Is the next game to discuss the Mario Bros. arcade game? Because I can tell you that commercial Nintendo made for it is like a fever dream.

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Close! I'm playing the Game&Watch games featuring Mario and will do SMB next.

Wasn't there a weird Game and Watch game where Mario has Donkey Kong perform in a circus or something? I haven't seen a lot of people talk about that one. I commend you for chatting about the Game and Watch since most people don't talk about them. I mean, technically speaking, the Game and Watch was Nintendo's first handheld gaming "system" before the Game Boy. There really is some fascinating history behind its games.

Time for the long-awaited SUPER MARIO GAME&WATCH GAMES!

No, not the 2021 game. The original Game&Watch, also known as Time-Out in America and Tricotronic in West Germany (yes, West Germany - this is the time period we're talking about). It took so long partly because I was considering actually buying one of them, but couldn't. At first, these games seem pretty boring (and they are), but I soon realised that the Game&Watch made Nintendo. More than Donkey Kong and more than the NES Super Mario Bros.


Mario's Cement Factory on the original Game&Watch

I played this on a RetroFab simulator. The game is incredibly simple. Cement falls through the 4 vats on the sides and into the trucks waiting at the bottom. Mario, the owner and sole worker of this cement factory, has to move in between the four vats to open them and let the cement through, using the elevating platforms in the middle. It's surprisingly difficult at first, but boredom will get you way before you get good at the game. I scored an (un)impressive 34 points before stopping.


Mario Bros (no, not the Arcade Mario Bros, nor the Super Mario Bros) - the first game to feature Luigi!

This is an infuriating game - I played it on the Game and Watch gallery for the GBC. In it, you have Mario and Luigi on either side of a tower of conveyor belts. Items appear in the lower-right corner, where Mario (or Luigi?) has to take them and put them on the 1st conveyor, at the other end of which Luigi (or Mario?) will take them and put them on the second conveyor belt, where, again, Mario (Luigi?) will take them and put them on the 3rd and so on until whomever we decided was on the left side will take them and throw them onto a truck. Items appear at various intervals, so you have to juggle both Mario and Luigi so that they are always there to take an item before it falls off the conveyor - if it does, their boss will appear and chastise them. Three strikes and the game ends (presumably they are both fired). "Mario and Luigi working in an Amazon warehouse" sounds like a dystopian 2020s dream, but there it is, in its 1983 glory. I scored 53 Amazon Points before Jeff Bezos fired me.

Wow, these games suck, EUR0TR0N! Why on Earth were you saying earlier that they made Nintendo?

I may be the last person born on Earth to have done this, but I still remember how, in the age before smartphones, I would sometimes get so bored in the summer middays when it was too hot to go out that, on occasion, I would take out a calculator and just, play with it. It seems incomprehensible to me now, but there was a time when there was so little entertainment that taking out a calculator and multiplying, adding and substracting various numbers felt fun. This is apparently what Gunpei Yokoi, R&D chief at Nintendo in the 80s, saw someone do on his train commute the day he came up with the idea of making the Game&Watch. An oversized digital watch with segmented LCD (like the ones in calculators), 64 Bytes of RAM and one single game.

To us today, this seems both weird and unsurprising - the 80s were forever ago, of course this must've been cutting edge back then! But it wasn't - even back then, the Game&Watch was old tech. There were already companies that were experimenting with real portable consoles with cartridges and real screens, hoping they'd be the first on the market. After the success of Donkey Kong, Nintendo could've joined them. They could've wasted their last money trying to invent the GameBoy 6 years earlier, completely fail and, either go bankrupt or live on like Namco and whomever owns the rights to Tetris, forever re-releasing Donkey Kong every 5 years, each time with names like "Reborn" or "New Generation", to give the impression that anything at all has changed.

But they didn't. Instead, Yokoi invented the philosophy that would make Nintendo: lateral thinking with withered technology. In other words, instead of trying to latch to whatever new thing you barely understand, you take old technology you already master and do something clever with it. This is the thinking that led Nintendo into just about every single one of its iconic decisions, good and bad.

As for the Game&Watch, this was long before video gaming was considered, to any degree, an activity in itself, that you'd sit down and do in your own time. Instead, this device was meant to quell boredom. On your commute, at work, waiting at the dentist's. The games are soul-crushingly boring to anyone in the new millenium, but if I was a Japanese office worker with a 1-hour commute back when there was no iPhone, but two Germanys, I'd play that thing every day of my life.

And so did the 40 MILLION people who bought this thing, saving Nintendo from its financial troubles and setting the course for the next 40+ years.

If you REALLY want to go hardcore, try playing every single version of every single mario game.

Paradox said:

If you REALLY want to go hardcore, try playing every single version of every single mario game.

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It's more that I wouldn't have enough time. =))

Will you consider donkey kong jr or no?

Took a while, but here it is: Mario Bros. for the NES!
Not to be confused with Super Mario Bros. for the NES or Amazon warehouse Simulator Mario Bros. for the Game&Watch.

I'm not gonna lie, this has never been my favourite Mario game. I remember first playing it as a kid, back when I'd play every singe Mario fan game, most of them modeled after the first Super Mario Bros games for the NES and SNES. By comparison, this game felt (and still feels) a bit clunky. The fact that momentum is a big part of the game is a clever twist, but, honestly, most 2d platformers that try this mechanic (this game included) fail. Before Sonic finally figured out that the key to entertaining momentum-based platforming is speed, every game that ever tried felt like driving an old car. If Mario in SMB is a sports car, accelerating to full speed in an instant, switching directions on the go, Mario (and Luigi) in Mario Bros. feel like some forgotten jalopy, taking a couple seconds to accelerate. And, if anything, this might be the worst game to try this gimmick in - if the long, horizontal, one-directional levels of other Mario games might lend well to momentum, the entire schtick of this game is jumping between platform levels in small spaces. Trying to run around feels like a pain.


(respawining you above the level might be the worst part, being the only game where jumping on koopas kills you, while hitting them from below defeats them)

But honestly? I like this game. Everything I said until now is understandable in a medium that was just being developed. Nintendo loves trying out wacky ideas. Mario jumped around awkwardly and took a full 2 seconds to change direction so Sonic could run. And it's not like the game wasn't well received at the time. But what I like most about this game is the style - even the clunky gameplay seems to reflect the old-timey Popeye western animation style that inspired early Mario. And this is not only the origin of Koopas, but the (canon) origin of Mario and Luigi - it's sort of weird to realise that their often-referenced backstory as plumbers from Brooklyn came out entirely from this one game. The omnipresent pipes in every single Mario game, the Koopas, Mario being an Italian-American from New York, all of this was first fleshed out in this one, relatively forgotten game. It makes you wonder what the Mario universe would've been like if it was based on one of the other games depicting Mario and Luigi as workers, like the cement mixing game, or the Amazon warehouse. An alternate universe where, instead of traveling through pipes, Mario was shot out of cement mixers or where he'd ride a forklift instead of Yoshi.

A reminder that I'm still at the beginning of Mario, where every single throwaway detail would go on to become integral to Mario's identity.