10 Years Ago, New Super Mario Bros. Made Old-School Cool… or Profitable, Anyway

This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.

Critics and gamers greeted NSMB with near-unanimous enthusiasm at the time of its debut. What few dissenters spoke up tended to be portable enthusiasts who had never given up on 2D platforming and found Mario's return to the format comparatively lacking in light of the continuing evolution found in numerous platformers that had slipped beneath the radar of mainstream console enthusiasts. Over time, however, NSMB's star has lost its luster thanks in large part to its own sequels; New Super Mario Bros. Wii overflowed with interesting new ideas, and New Super Mario Bros. U may well be the finest take on the classic Mario formula ever. The brilliance of these games has thrown the relative mundanity of NSMB's design into sharp relief. Even the odd and controversial New Super Mario Bros. 2 mixed things up with its emphasis on over-the-top coin-collecting. Where people couldn't say enough good things about NSMB a decade ago, today it's hard to find anyone who will lavish it with unqualified praise.

As such, NSMB is perhaps best understood in this context: A midpoint in Nintendo's modern 2D game efforts. Rudimentary, perhaps, but deliberately so. Nintendo's Mario team hadn't designed a new side-scrolling platformer from the ground up since Yoshi's Island, a decade prior. After 10 years of high-profile 3D outings for Mario that pushed the boundaries of game design, NSMB acted as a reintroduction to classic gaming for fans and developers alike.

Well, for "fans" in the general sense, anyway. Nintendo already had a comparatively small following that had enjoyed the company's 2D platformer outings in the decade between Super Mario 64 making the genre obsolete and NSMB making it hip again; old-school portable games like Wario Land 4 and Metroid Fusion often cracked the million mark in sales, qualifying them as definite successes. Aside from a handful of third-party series like Castlevania and Mega Man, though, Nintendo stood as the one publisher to commit serious resources to the "dated" 2D platformer genre, which remained essentially the mainstay of the company's portable consoles throughout the late '90s and into the following decade. Excellent as they may have been, though, the portable nature of these outings generally resulted in most gamers turning their noses up to them. Sure, the Mario Advance games sold like gangbusters, but that can be chalked up to the general appeal and name recognition of the Mario brand - they were the exception rather than the rule.

"Mario is special," says Adelman. "What works for a Mario game might not work for anything else."

With NSMB, Nintendo leveraged that unique quality to create a breakout hit that extended well beyond that game itself. Never mind that its level design felt undeniably regressive compared to the GBA platformers that had preceded it (the most innovative trick in NSMB's book was requiring players to carry Micro Mushrooms from one stage to another in order to find alternate exits, a trick that many fans had already seen in 2004's Kirby and the Amazing Mirror for GBA); NSMB took the important step of dropping dated-looking sprites in favor of polygons, which gave it a cleaner, more "modern" appearance. Aside from the rare, screen-shattering Mega Mushroom, NSMB did little to take advantage of the flexibility offered by polygonal graphics - that would come with the dynamic New Super Mario Bros. Wii - yet the more contemporary overall look proved to be enough to appeal to a modern audience.

Again, NSMB served as a sort of bridge in this respect, helping to open the door for other games in "retro" genres or styles to re-enter the mainstream. It didn't single-handedly revitalize old-school game design, but it helped make a crucial connection.

"It was part of that era where retro styled games were becoming more legitimate to publishers," says Ramachandra. "It showed that people still want to play these classic games, and that you don't have to retire certain genres forever."

By no means was New Super Mario Bros. the first game to mix the old and new in this specific way. "2.5D" platformers that depicted flat, side-scrolling action with polygonal objects had been around for a decade by the time Nintendo dipped its toe into the action, having gained a small following in the '90s beginning with 32-bit games like SEGA's Clockwork Knight, Pandemonium! by Crystal Dynamics, and Namco's Klonoa. Nintendo had even published a handful of 2.5D games themselves in the form of Mischief Makers and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards for Nintendo 64.

What NSMB represented, however, was the format's first genuine megahit: A 2.5D platformer that appealed to more than the niche audience of enthusiasts who refused to let classic game styles die. Tellingly, Nintendo published NSMB contemporaneously with a well-regarded trio 2.5D action games by Capcom for PlayStation Portable - Mega Man: Powered Up, Maverick Hunter X, and Ultimate Ghosts 'N Goblins - but those competitors fared so poorly that Capcom quickly scrapped its publicly stated plans to turn them into ongoing series. The difference? Nintendo aimed for the broadest possible audience with NSMB, whereas Capcom focused on the hardcore audience with aging franchises and brutal difficulty levels. Where Capcom's games faded, NSMB helped inspire a number of games that built on its strongest ideas... including Capcom's own Mega Man 9, which went a step further than NSMB in looking to the past for inspiration by carefully modeling its design and visuals on 1989's Mega Man 2 for NES.

At the same time, Adelman cautions against giving NSMB too much credit for reinvigorating classic 2D action games. "I think that claiming it brought back retro-style games is a bit of an overstatement," he says. "I think the reason 2D games have made a comeback is that the people who grew up playing them were finally able to make games of their own – and they were inspired by what they played as kids. By the time New Super Mario Bros. came out, the indie scene was starting to emerge, and there was already a lot of retro-themed games coming from that community."

Happ and Petruzzi agree. "I'm still not sure publishers really took note of the retro appeal until XBLA games started selling like gangbusters," says Happ.

"Nintendo had still been doing a lot of 2D stuff on handhelds up to that point," adds Petruzzi. "I think back then people still felt like sprite art was OK on handhelds since the controls were simple and raw power was much lower than what you could get from consoles. Personally, I think the real step came when XBLA games showed up on Xbox [360] and made people question what to expect from a modern game console."

Still, while New Super Mario Bros. didn't singlehandedly inspire the move toward retro-style, it occupies an important place on the timeline of the classic platformer's revitalization. Portable masterpieces like Mega Man Zero and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow kept the genre alive; retro masterpieces like Cave Story helped spark an indie uprising; and early XBLA breakouts like N+ and Fez helped transform independent development into a huge business. NSMB's achievement was in making an essential connection between the deprecated old-school platformer, the burgeoning indie scene, and gaming's console mainstream. Where you could count the number of 2D platformer releases on PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox on a single hand, the format became far more common after NSMB. Perhaps more impressively, those follow-ups demonstrated that a genre written off a decade prior as a dated relic still had life: New Super Mario Bros. Wii ended up selling nearly as well as its DS predecessor. NSMB may not have revolutionized gaming, but it rekindled a fire by reminding millions of fans of what had been lost in the industry's sudden abandonment of 2D game design in the mid-'90s.

"NSMB legitimized old-school Mario again," says Ramachandra. "I was never the biggest fan of 3D Mario games, so having 2D Mario again had me overjoyed. It also introduced 2D platformers to a whole new generation. I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years, a new string of game developers cite NSMB (and subsequently Mario Maker) as the game that got them interested in game development.

"No idea is ever too old. Some mechanics don't necessarily age well when reinserted into a contemporary game, but some tweaking and clever thinking can revive an old idea and make it new again."

"NSMB proved that classic 2D Mario gameplay is still fun to the average gamer no matter if its in 1986 or 2006," agrees Petruzzi. "It seems like it was a good test by Nintendo to see how people would react to taking the franchise back a step back to 2D."

"I think it's a testament to the idea that craftsmanship matters," suggests Adelman. "There are plenty of tools out there for making 2D platformers, just as there are tools for making first-person shooters, RPGs, or any other genre you can think of. There's even Super Mario Maker! But only the game development professionals at Nintendo EAD could create a game as perfect as New Super Mario Bros."

Happ, however seems more muted in his appraisal of the game. "If anything, I probably think of it in a cautionary sense that it's okay to occasionally put a fresh coat of paint on an old franchise, but for it to be memorable you need to make a more meaningful change to how it plays," he says. "I honestly don't think I could extricate the influences of NSMB from the influences of previous Mario titles."

Whatever its shortcomings, New Super Mario Bros. was exactly the game Nintendo needed it to be: A nostalgic, eye-catching romp that reminded old fans of a forgotten mode of game design, introduced younger players to a new-to-them corner of gaming, and helped carve a place for classic platformers amidst the cover-based shooters and first-person war games of the HD era. Is it a masterpiece? Maybe not. But it's definitely a classic.