I'm taking it back bitches because it's mine more than any of you young kids can lay claim to.

Super Mario Brothers.

1985, the NES comes out, I see it featured in Boys Life as the hot new thing.

I see R.O.B., I see a gun, I see paradise.

I begged and pleaded with my parents to get me one.

"PAH! you have Superman and ET on your Atari 2600!"

"This is different! It has a robot!" <--- early tip off that I'd wind up here, I'm sure.

Well, Xmas came and went that year, little known to me that while my dad was on a business trip in NYC he managed to score one of the few NES Deluxe Sets available at the time. Along with a copy of Super Mario Bros.

Shortly after discovering what a miraculous turd Gyromite is (yet I still have my original R.O.B. as seen...)



After discovering how little I cared for Gyromite, Super Mario Brothers got to take it's turn on the field. Ducks are swell and all, but the mocking of that dog drove me mad.


Go to hell, seriously.

I put in Super Mario Brothers and from there started off a life long love of platforming and Mario.

Fuck Sonic.
Fuck Blast Processing.
Fuck Spyro, Blinx, The damn cat with the ! on his shirt, fuck everything else. Mario.

I played the original Super Mario Brothers for what must have been a good month solid before even realizing that I still owned those other two games. Such bliss. Such fun.

As an 8 year old, it's hard to wrap your head around why the Princess ain't in the castle and why there's a short fat dude who dresses badly in her place, but whatever, take me to the next level.

I amazed myself at how intuitive it all seemed. I found the warp zones well before there was a Nintendo Players Guide to help me get there.

I beat 8-4 with simple trial and error, not with Brady Games in tow, telling me how to play a game.


Did you know that images of things that are comforting and familiar triggers endorphins in your brain that are the same as those released after an orgasm? It's true, watch.



Ahh.... Yeah...

My point being that I have a very strong emotional attachment to this game. How strong? Well...

I've beaten this game well over 100 times, many times on multiple playthroughs in one sitting.

I've bought this game on 6 different consoles. NES, GameBoy Color, SNES (all stars), GBA, Wii, and finally an original Famicom copy.


Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down...

I sold my original NES to my cousin to get a SNES, and the one game I regret selling out of all of them, was Super Mario Brothers. More than Dragon Warrior, more than Bionic Commando. More than my NES Advantage. I missed my Mario.

Now that I'm all grown up some 22 years later, the only thing I can think of that's a more relaxing time is to kick back, put on the Famputer, and fire up Super Mario Brothers (as it's called in Japan.) It's a great game, and it always will be.

More important than playing Super Mario, is for me to thank Shigeru Miyamoto for creating a game based off of a mortal enemy of a giant monkey and somehow making something as absurd as Super Mario Brothers must've been on paper and making it work.