Vote up the Mario trivia you'd never heard before.
Super Mario Bros. marked the beginning of the console revolution that changed video games forever. Yes, there were plenty of console games over in Japan, but it wasn’t until a little plumber and his brother set out to save a princess from an ox/turle/sorta dragon that the world began to take notice of side scrolling console games.
This list of Super Mario Bros. trivia contains some facts even the most knowledgeable players probably aren’t aware of. And if you do know about some of these, you either work for Nintendo or you haven’t left your bedroom in 30 years. See how many of these Super Mario Bros. fun facts you know.
Mario Brothers trivia is always fun because it reminds you of a simpler time when all you had to worry about was whether or not you could save the princess before dinner. As long as your brother or sister didn’t hold down the reset button while you were playing, you probably did just fine. The facts on this list of 20 things you didn’t know about Super Mario span the creation of the much loved character, all the way to the fun stuff like glitches in the game and which famous composer designed a small piece of Mario history.
Vote up the most interesting bits of trivia for Super Mario Bros. and if you know a piece of information about the game that we don’t, leave it in the comments!
If you want to access the 256(!) extra glitch levels in Super Mario Bros. you need to go find yourself a top loading NES system and a copy of Nintendo Tennis. Put your Mario cartridge in, then take it out with the system still on. Put the Tennis cartridge in, then reset. Serve once, run around for a bit, and then take Tennis out with the system still on and put Mario back in. Reset Mario, then press both A and start at once and you’ll be on one of the 256 glitched out “secret levels."
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Super Mario Bros. Was Meant to Be the Last Cartridge Game EVER
Before becoming Nintendo's first big hit in America, Super Mario Bros. was supposed to be Nintendo's cartridge based ride into the sunset before they switched to the floppy disk-based Famicom Disk System. Ironically, the game was so popular that cartridges stuck around for another two decades.
Shigeru Miyamoto initially sketched Bowser as an ox. His drawings were misinterpreted by animator Yoichi Kotabe as a turtle, but then the duo worked together to mix the two ideas and the Bowser we know today was born.
Before creating Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto worked on the racing game Excitebike. For those that don't remember, Excitebike allowed you to choose which track (Easy, Medium, Hard) you wanted to play. Miyamoto loved the idea so much that he wanted to put it in Mario, but he didn't want players to skip to the end. That's when the Warp Zone after level 1-2 was born.
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Japan's Version of the Minus World Is Totally Different
The Minus World is a giant glitch in Super Mario Bros. that allows you to pass through a wall at the end of World 1-2 and get to the first Warp Zone via a method the game didn’t intend. Enter the far left pipe and you’ll end up in World -1, an infinitely looping underwater stage. In the Japanese Famicom Disk System version, the Minus World remains, but you can actually finish it and go on to two more Minus Worlds.
If you beat those, you're taken back to the title screen and you can unlock hard mode. Was this a glitch or an Easter egg for the Japanese audience?
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Mario's Design Is Based on Graphical Impossibilities
We live in a world of almost infinite possibilities when it comes to graphics in video games, but when Shigeru Miyamoto was creating Super Mario Bros., he had to come up with interesting ways around his very real limitations. Mario was given a mustache in order to get around drawing a mouth, and he sports a hat because it was almost impossible to portray hair.
What about the overalls? Those ensured that players could tell that he was swinging his hands back and forth as he was walking or running.
