When Mario became a Plumber

When we talk Mario, we’re usually talking about Bowser and Toadstools, Goombas and flying Lakitus dumping spiky eggs on our red-capped skulls. But I wanna back up a bit and talk about the original Mario Bros, the Nintendo coin-op arcade machine from 1983, recently given a new audience as a a Wii Virtual Console release (which is actually a port of the NES version). This game is the reason we call Mario a “plumber”, and not a “carpenter”. It’s the reason why these days Mario takes his anger out on turtles and not monkey-thrown barrels. And it’s also why so many gamers of a certain age have the inexplicable urge to jump up and bash their heads into low brick overhangs, wherever they find them.

The Job At Hand

If Mario’s debut in Donkey Kong was basically an obstacle course, then Mario Bros is a battle royale. The boys must take their stand in a big sewer chamber, staking out two open pipes that plop out evil critters almost nonstop, and kill them by first flipping them over, then kicking their carcasses into the rotting abyss of sewage below. Among the baddies are Shellcreepers (the turtle prototype for the Koopa), Sidestepper crabs, hopping Fighterflies, and weird snowmen called Slipice, who slick the floor with their frozen, natural bodily fluids. Now, I get why there would be turtles down there (flushed pets) and flies and crabs (carrion scavengers), but why snowmen?? I guess it could be from all those people who dumped their freon down the tubes when it was banned by the EPA.

The brothers are resigned to a grim, blue-collar fate. This isn’t a mad dash to a glorious finish line, with banners and fireworks and swooning princesses. No, this is one of those old-school games that you can’t beat by “finishing”. There’s nothing to finish. There’s no travel involved, no power-ups, no enemy castle to storm. No big reptile boss whose death would end the tyranny of marching turtle soldiers everywhere. These are just turtles, mucking up the water pressure for the tenement buildings above. This fight won’t mean glory and riches, it’s just a living. Whenever you kill a critter, one of those now-famous gold coins comes out of the pipes, payment for services rendered. You better get those coins, since they’re worth 800 points each, which is as much as killing a single critter—you could get almost half your points this way.

Is it me, or is it just rude that the landlord would “flush” your money down to you instead of writing a check for the full invoice? Apparently the Bros. are working an under-the-table, non-union gig here, getting paid by the piece instead of by the hour. That probably means no pension at age 65, so the Bros are going to be down there a long, long time. So appropriately, Mario Bros. favors the patient planners, not the headlong rushers. You have to plan ahead because you can’t run that fast or jump very high with those low ceilings. You have to anticipate when bad guys or coins will bump against each other and reverse directions. It’s a lot better to intercept things than to chase behind them, since you can just barely move faster than everything else. It often pays to leave a stunned critter as a roadblock against another, giving you more time to get in position to take him on at the other side when he turns around.

It’s About Brotherhood

Mario Bros. became famous for its 2-player team play. Most 2-player games until that point were either “doubles” where players switch out between lives, or competitive, where players blast each other. Though it wasn’t the original team-up game (Joust, Wizard of War and Rip-Off were all there first) it was probably the best, with team spirit in its very soul. Sure you got “Mario” with one player, but you didn’t have “Bros.” unless you got Luigi’s butt down in that sewer too. There was a brilliant symbiosis built into the two required tasks of the game… first to smash the floor beneath a sewer critter, and then to jump up to that deck and finish him off. One job must be done from below the bad guy’s platform, and the other can only be done on top of it. And since these Bros. are kind of slow, like… a couple of pudgy plumbers, it really helps to get one on each position.

The Joust Connection…??

If you were alive and arcading back in 1983, you may have gotten a weird sense of deja-vu the first time you tried Mario Bros. That’s probably because you’d already played Joust, Williams’ monster hit coin-op from the year before. Joust was an amazing game combining several new or uncommon features-- and Mario incorporated nearly all of them. That suggests Joust was a large inspiration to Nintendo’s designers. I know what you’re thinking, totally impossible, since one game is about turtle stompers and the other is about flittering fowl-riders. Maybe I have been huffing sewer gas… but here’s the rundown.

As I mentioned, both games are co-ops, with 2 sets of controls, both consisting of a Jump/Flap button, and a 2-way lever. It’s not a 4-way stick, because there was no use of vertical stick movement. Jump or Flap takes you up, and gravity takes you down (no ladders either)! Both take place on just one playfield, a dark cavern with floating platforms, and a wrap-around effect (where exiting the left side of the screen causes you to enter from the right, and vice-versa). In both games, the initial attack does not kill the enemy… in both you must hurry to intercept the enemy’s body (in the case of Joust, it’s an egg), and finish it off before it gets up again. If you don’t, then a faster, more dangerous version of the same enemy will return in its place. Both games have inertial running physics, where it takes a moment to get traction and build momentum, and likewise to stop and reverse directions. In both games you can choose the timing for your respawn after losing a life. In Mario, it’s choosing when to step off the floating platform, in Joust it’s leaving the protection of the teleporter. In both, you have to hurry to finish the stage, or a series of deadly “timer monsters” will appear and chase you — it’s Pterodactyls in Joust, and Fireballs in Mario. The main difference is that Mario has to “JUMPUP!!” to bash the critters from below, while the Joust knight must drop from the air above. So in a sense, Mario Bros is like Joust upside-down.

All that aside, Mario was a great classic that only had a brief moment to exist… by the time Super Mario Bros. came out a couple years later, it was all over for the this type of stationary platform game. But Mario’s hip scene came largely from this game… turtles, pipes, coins and brick busting-- they all have their roots right here.

But just imagine if they’d let him have a plunger…?