The big one!
Super Mario Bros.
NES
Release Date: October 18th, 1985
The game that kickstarted many a gamer, the game that's THE classic among a sea of classics. One of the original NES' most famous games, even packaged with it - a title that held, for a long time, the record of most-selling game of all time!
With the gift of hindsight and about 38 years since the release of this legend, Mario's first full platform game is... well, almost laughable. It's easy, fairly short as well, a ton of people know this one like the back of their hand. From the perspective of a child discovering gaming, like I was... Hell, this was pretty challenging! But because something is the first means it set the foundation for everything that came afterwards, so that Super Mario Bros. is simple is to its benefit. Built upon those very foundations would be the next Mario platformers. ....well... an extra-hard identical sequel, a reskin of a completely different game, and finally some new with SMB3, but still. It's to a point where we think more of this game for its mark on gaming history than as a game proper.
A small set of enemies, all of which have become mainstays of the Mario series - seriously, I can name them that easily. Goombas, Koopa Troopas and Paratroopas, Bullet Bills, Piranha Plants, Spinies, Lakitus, Buzzy Beetles, Hammer Bros., Cheep-Cheep, Bloopers, Fire Bars and Podoboos if you wanna include 'em, and of course big ol' Bowser. All icons in their own right. Mario AND Luigi playable, for those folks competing in two-player... Significant differences in the brothers' abilities wouldn't appear until The Lost Levels.
I played it every so often. I think it was a favorite of mine. Even at my young age at the time, this game's reputation preceded it. I think I actually had a version that had only this game on the cartridge, and a second version that included Duck Hunt. (I'll get to that one eventually.) Did I actually beat the game back when I owned it on a physical NES? ...I genuinely don't remember, to be entirely honest. Keep in mind that several of these memories are one to two decades old, so my memory may be hazy at times. But yeah, I can at least say that I experienced Mario's big outing, the game that made him famous in households after he was already famous in arcades.
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