Super Mario Bros 3: 20 years later

Holy effing s-word! Was it really 20 years ago when we first opened the distinctive yellow package in our living room and carefully placed the cartridge into the NES in front of the TV? When we made our first return trip to the Mushroom Kingdom? When we discovered the power of flight? When we could actually choose levels off of an overworld map? When we met Bowser's children? When the mustachioed one had his greatest adventure yet?

Yes, 20 years ago this very day, the American public got to play Super Mario Bros 3. Though overly technical nerds or Japanese people will say, "it came out in Japan in 1988, so 2008 was the 20th anniversary," and Europeans will rightly argue, "we didn't get it till 1991," those views don't count, because America is number one! USA! USA!

Where were we? Right, Mario. On this major anniversary that reminds aging gamers of their own mortality, your friends at GamesRadar are here to help you celebrate all things great and small that made Mario 3 shine.

Something to prove

It's important to remember that Mario 3 was the first true follow-up to the original Super Mario Bros. Despite there being two Super Mario 2s, one for the US and one for Japan, those were both more like off-shoots or digressions than real sequels. It's a fairly well-known fact that the English-speaking world's Mario 2 was a reskinned non-Mario game called Doki Doki Panic, great in its own right, but quite different from Mario 1. Meanwhile, Japan's Mario 2 was too similar to Mario 1, because outside of some small tweaks, it was made with the same engine and most of the same enemies; the only difference was its soul-crushing difficulty.

So when Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario's daddy) and his development team R&D4 started work on Mario 3, they knew they had a big task ahead of them. It needed the core Mario gameplay (not the turnip-throwing of the US Mario 2), but they also needed to add a ton of new features and have some of the best NES graphics ever to keep things fresh. Working under that kind of pressure must have inspired them, as Miyamoto and the gang put out a true sequel that was at the same time familiar and completely new. (So maybe this one should've been called Mario 2.)

Up, up and away

The most obvious addition, the biggest game changer, and the focus of the iconic box art was that, for the first time ever, Mario could fly. How major a shift this was for platformers is hard to overstate. It changed the way a stage could be laid out. Not only could Mario just fly over obstacles if he built up enough speed, but the level designs were dramatically deepened, as secrets and alternate paths could be hidden just out of sight. It made levels exist both vertically and horizontally, with level creation needing to match the new possibilities.

The first stage of the game was amazingly designed to let the player get used to this new concept. You were given a large space to run in and build up your P-meter which, even as a de-powered Mario, enabled much higher jumps. Very soon after that, you got Mario 3's marquee power-up, the Raccoon Leaf, and became the proto-furry Raccoon Mario. It was based on some bit of weird Japanese folklore that says raccoons are able to fly over short distances, but who cares that it doesn't really make sense? It was such a freeing experience to leave gravity behind, even if for a short while.

World 1-1 also has a couple secret areas that can only be found while in flight, letting dedicated players know that exploring the skies throughout the game would pay off. But it was the little things about flight we loved most, particularly the cute sound effect Mario's tail made as you pressed the jump button to slow your descent. It has this comforting je ne sais quoi that soothes us as we guide Mario to a (hopefully) safe landing.

That's one deep closet

As we've mentioned before, Mario loves to play dress-up. But outside of his Fire Suit in the first Super Mario Bros, it wasn't until Super Mario 3 that costume-based power-ups became central to the gameplay. To complement the returning fire power was the aforementioned Raccoon Mario, the full-on Tanooki Suit with fake Buddhist-statue abilities, the cute-but-not-particularly-useful-out-of-water Frog Suit, wearing the skin of your enemy in a Hammer Bros Suit and the incredibly rare, coveted Kuribo's shoe.

And to make the power-ups even more worthwhile was the new ability to keep a few on hold to use before entering a level if you really needed to. There were several places, such as Toad Houses, to get more, but they were limited. So in certain situations, you had to be sure you wanted to use your only Tanooki Suit in a tough ice level or save it for later. Just another great touch of strategy added to the game that seems so simple now, but was huge at the time.

Mario! Mario!

Nintendo's hype machine was in full effect for Mario 3 once it was ready for its US debut. And of all the commercials, this is the one that stands out in the minds of the now-nostalgic gamers of that time.

Above: So cool, you don’t even have to see gameplay