Long before Mario ran beneath a blue sky toward a flagpole, Nintendo placed him underground.
The world of Mario Bros. was dark, confined, and built around a maze of platforms and pipes. Strange creatures crawled from openings at the top of the screen while Mario, and for the first time his brother Luigi, fought them from below. There were no castles waiting at the end of a kingdom, no Princess Peach to rescue, and no long journey from one side of a level to the other. Instead, the entire battle took place on a single screen.
Yet the 1983 arcade game became one of the most important steps in Nintendo’s history. It established Mario and Luigi as brothers, helped transform Mario from the construction worker seen in Donkey Kong into the plumber recognized around the world, introduced ideas that would survive throughout the franchise, and gave Mario his first starring game with his own name in the title.
Nintendo itself describes Mario Bros. as the first title in the Mario series. The United States Copyright Office likewise calls the 1983 arcade game the first game of the franchise. That makes an important distinction in Mario’s history. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, but Mario Bros. became the beginning of the Mario series in 1983. Super Mario Bros., released two years later, began the separate Super Mario series.
From Jumpman to Mario
Mario’s story began without the name Mario.
When Nintendo released Donkey Kong in 1981, players controlled a small character who climbed a construction site while avoiding barrels thrown by Donkey Kong. Nintendo’s corporate history identifies the character as a carpenter originally called Jumpman. Shigeru Miyamoto later explained that the tiny figure had to be designed around severe graphical limitations. His large nose and mustache helped create a recognizable face with very few pixels, his hat eliminated the problem of animating hair, and his overalls made the movement of his arms easier to see against his body.
The design was practical rather than the result of a long plan to create a corporate mascot. Miyamoto even recalled thinking of the character as a recurring figure he could use in different games, almost like an actor appearing in different roles.
The name Mario emerged through Nintendo’s growing American operation. Miyamoto recalled that someone connected to Nintendo’s warehouse in the United States was named Mario, and Nintendo’s American employees began using that name for the character. Nintendo’s own corporate history connects the name with warehouse landlord Mario Segale. Whatever uncertainty surrounds some of the later embellishments to the story, Nintendo itself has long acknowledged Segale as the inspiration for the name.
Donkey Kong became an enormous success for Nintendo, but Mario was still a character inside someone else’s title. Mario Bros. changed that. Nintendo now had a game named for Mario himself.
Building a New Kind of Mario Game
Development of Mario Bros. brought Shigeru Miyamoto together again with the influential Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi. Miyamoto later remembered that Yokoi proposed making a competitive game, providing an early foundation for what became Mario Bros.
The designers did not simply copy the movement of Donkey Kong. They experimented with what Mario should be able to do. In Donkey Kong, falling too far could cost the player a life. Yokoi suggested allowing Mario to survive much greater drops. Miyamoto was initially uncertain, but a prototype in which Mario could run, jump, and bounce around convinced the developers that exaggerated movement could be entertaining.
Another important idea came from the floors themselves. Yokoi suggested that Mario should be able to strike a platform from underneath and attack an enemy walking above him. The first version made defeating enemies too easy, so the designers introduced a second step. Striking an enemy from beneath would only flip it over. Mario then had to reach the same platform and kick the helpless creature away before it recovered.
That simple change created the central rhythm of Mario Bros.. The player had to position Mario below an enemy, strike at the correct moment, move quickly to another level, and finish the attack before the creature recovered.
The need for an enemy that could logically survive being hit from underneath also influenced the game’s creatures. Miyamoto recalled that the team settled on turtles because a turtle could be turned onto its back and later right itself. The basic idea was so effective that turtle-like enemies became permanently associated with Mario, even though they would evolve considerably in later games.
The Pipes That Changed Mario
The pipes may have been even more important.
Miyamoto explained that the developers needed a way for defeated or escaped enemies to circulate through the stage rather than simply disappearing at the bottom of the screen. Connecting the left and right sides was easy enough, but connecting the top and bottom directly did not make much visual sense.
The solution came partly from the imagery of manga and partly from the world outside Nintendo’s office. Miyamoto remembered seeing drainage pipes protruding from a concrete wall while traveling home from work. Pipes offered a believable way for creatures to leave one part of the stage and emerge somewhere else.
Once pipes became central to the environment, the game’s setting developed around them. Mario Bros. took place underground in a sewer-like world filled with water pipes and pests.
That decision also changed Mario himself.
Miyamoto has explained that Mario had been treated as a carpenter in Donkey Kong because that game took place around a construction site. When Nintendo moved him into an underground environment dominated by pipes, making him a plumber seemed logical. The occupation that would eventually become inseparable from Mario’s identity therefore grew directly from the setting of Mario Bros..
The plumber was not created first and then placed among pipes. The pipes came first, and the plumber followed.
Mario Meets Luigi
Mario Bros. also introduced another character who would become nearly as recognizable as Mario himself.
Luigi made his video game debut in the 1983 arcade version of Mario Bros. Nintendo later celebrated 2013 as the “Year of Luigi” specifically because it marked thirty years since his first appearance in the arcade game.
His presence was tied directly to the game’s multiplayer design. One person could control Mario while another controlled Luigi at the same time. This was more than a turn-taking system in which one player waited while the other played. Both brothers occupied the same screen, confronted the same enemies, and could affect one another.
A contemporary Nintendo sales flyer emphasized the two-player feature, and Cash Box, an amusement-industry trade publication, highlighted the same quality in July 1983. Nintendo marketing director Frank Ballouz told the magazine that players could challenge the action either competitively or cooperatively. Nintendo even designed a wider control panel for the upright cabinet to make simultaneous play more comfortable.
That mixture of cooperation and sabotage became one of the game’s most memorable qualities. Two players might coordinate their movements, with one striking an enemy from below and the other finishing it. Moments later, one player could interfere with the other, compete for points, or turn a supposedly cooperative game into a rivalry.
Nintendo still emphasizes that freedom when describing the game today, noting that two players can work together or interfere with one another.
Fighting the Pests Beneath the City
The basic rules of Mario Bros. were easy to understand, but surviving increasingly dangerous phases required timing and control.
Enemies emerged from pipes near the upper portion of the screen and traveled across platforms toward the bottom. Mario could not normally defeat them by jumping directly onto them, the method that would later become familiar in Super Mario Bros. Instead, he attacked the floor underneath them.
The player struck a platform from below to overturn an enemy, climbed or jumped to its level, and then kicked it away before it recovered. Different creatures complicated that process. Shellcreepers could be flipped with a single strike. Sidesteppers required more effort and became faster when angered. Fighterflies moved by hopping and could only be overturned at the right point in their movement.
The POW block near the bottom of the stage gave players an emergency weapon by striking enemies throughout the screen, although its use was limited. Later stages introduced additional hazards, including fireballs and Slipice enemies that could freeze platforms and make movement more dangerous.
The result was a game built around repeating spaces rather than continuous travel. Players learned the geometry of the screen, watched the movement of enemies, judged where they would emerge, and tried to control an increasingly chaotic environment.
Atari’s contemporary instructions for its home version preserved the same central concept, describing the process as a two-part maneuver in which players first flipped a pest from below and then reached it before it could recover. The manual also encouraged two players to divide the work between attacking from underneath and kicking enemies away, while warning that an opponent could just as easily interfere.
Mario Bros. Arrives in the Arcades
The exact day on which the original arcade version of Mario Bros. should be considered commercially released is less secure than some modern game databases suggest, so the surviving contemporary record deserves careful treatment.
Nintendo consistently identifies the arcade game as a 1983 release. The July 9, 1983 issue of Cash Box described Mario Bros. as Nintendo of America’s newest video arcade game and said that it was available through factory distributors. The same issue’s equipment listing gave Mario Bros. an approximate production date of June 1983. Later, the United States Copyright Office recorded the game as registered on July 19, 1983.
By August, Cash Box was treating the game as an established Nintendo release. Its August 20 review section introduced it by telling readers that Donkey Kong’s Mario had returned, this time joined by his brother Luigi to battle underground pests.
Nintendo marketed the machine heavily around its multiplayer appeal. Surviving sales material promoted the ability to challenge a friend and stressed that two people could play simultaneously. Operators could purchase dedicated machines, but Nintendo also promoted conversion equipment capable of turning existing cabinets into Mario Bros. machines, an important consideration in an arcade industry where operators constantly weighed the cost of replacing aging games.
The physical cabinet therefore tells part of the story as well. The wide control area, two sets of controls, brightly illustrated characters, and instructions built into the artwork all reinforced the idea that Mario Bros. was meant to attract two people to the machine at once.
From the Arcade to the Famicom
Nintendo did not leave Mario Bros. in the arcade.
The Family Computer, better known as the Famicom, had launched in Japan during the summer of 1983. Nintendo released the Famicom version of Mario Bros. on September 9, 1983. Nintendo’s Japanese archive still identifies that release date and describes the game as the first title in the Mario series.
Bringing the game home helped give Mario a place within Nintendo’s new console business at exactly the moment that the company was beginning one of the most important transitions in its history. Mario had started as an arcade character, but the Famicom would eventually provide the platform on which he became Nintendo’s defining figure.
The two-controller design of the Famicom also suited Mario Bros. particularly well. Miyamoto later recalled thinking about home play differently from arcade play because home players were no longer paying for each individual attempt. Games could be enjoyed for longer periods, and the Famicom’s two controllers made titles such as Mario Bros. natural choices for shared play.
The game also traveled beyond Nintendo hardware. Atari licensed Mario Bros. for its home systems, advertising versions for the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. Atari’s packaging identified the game as Mario Bros. by Nintendo, preserving Nintendo’s copyright while bringing Mario and Luigi into homes that did not yet have Nintendo’s own console.
The Other Mario Bros. of 1983
One unusual wrinkle in Mario history can cause confusion because Nintendo also released a Game & Watch title called Mario Bros. in 1983.
It was not a portable conversion of the arcade game.
The Game & Watch version placed Mario and Luigi in a bottling factory, where they passed packages between one another instead of battling sewer creatures. The Centre for Computing History dates that handheld release to March 14, 1983, making it an early use of the Mario Bros. name but a substantially different game. The Copyright Office likewise distinguishes the arcade title from the separate Game & Watch work in its registration history.
For understanding the main video game series, Nintendo’s own historical classification is the clearest guide. The company identifies the familiar arcade and Famicom Mario Bros. as the first Mario-series title and treats the 1985 Super Mario Bros. as the beginning of the Super Mario series.
From Mario Bros. to Super Mario Bros.
The importance of Mario Bros. becomes even clearer when it is viewed beside the game Nintendo produced two years later.
Miyamoto did not see Super Mario Bros. as something created without a foundation. He has repeatedly described ideas in the later game as growing out of earlier experiments in Donkey Kong and Mario Bros.
The difference was space.
Mario Bros. remained on a stationary screen with the dark background common to arcade games of its era. Miyamoto wanted to move beyond those limitations. Nintendo experimented with scrolling environments, larger versions of Mario, colorful backgrounds, and a world in which movement itself could become the adventure.
During development experiments in late 1984, Miyamoto asked programmers to create a Mario approximately twice the size of the character used in Mario Bros. and let him jump around. Those tests became part of the path toward the larger characters, scrolling stages, and transformation mechanics of Super Mario Bros..
When Super Mario Bros. reached the Famicom on September 13, 1985, it transformed Mario again. Pipes remained. Turtles remained in evolved form. Jumping remained central. Mario and Luigi remained brothers. What changed was the scale of the world around them.
Instead of surviving inside a single underground chamber, Mario could now run across an entire kingdom.
Nintendo officially describes the 1985 game as the first title in the Super Mario series, confirming that the distinction between the two games is more than a matter of terminology. Mario Bros. began the broader Mario series. Super Mario Bros. began the side-scrolling series that would make Mario an international icon.
The First Mario Game Became a Foundation
Looking backward from decades of Mario games can make Mario Bros. seem unusually small.
There is no Mushroom Kingdom to explore. Bowser does not appear. Princess Peach is absent. There are no power-up mushrooms, no Goombas, no flagpoles, and no scrolling journey toward a distant castle.
What the game contains is arguably more important.
It has Mario in his first named starring series. It has Luigi’s debut. It has the brothers working as plumbers in a world dominated by pipes. It has turtle enemies, exaggerated jumping, two-player cooperation and competition, and a design philosophy built around simple actions becoming increasingly complicated through the player’s interaction with the environment.
Those ideas did not all survive unchanged, but they gave Nintendo a vocabulary from which later Mario games could grow.
Today Nintendo can look back on a franchise filled with racing games, role-playing games, sports titles, puzzle games, parties, three-dimensional adventures, and some of the most successful platform games ever created. The family tree has become enormous.
Its roots, however, lead back to a dark arcade screen in 1983, where two brothers stood beneath a maze of platforms waiting for the next creature to crawl from a pipe.
Before the Mushroom Kingdom, there was the sewer.
Before Super Mario Bros., there was Mario Bros.
Sources & Further Reading
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “Mario Bros.” Family Computer Software Archive. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/jp/famicom/software/hvc-ma/index.html
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “Mario Bros.” Nintendo Classics. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/jp/games/feature/nintendo-classics/clv-p-haawj/index.html
Chen, Nicole McNew. “Find Video Games in Copyright.” Copyright: Creativity at Work, U.S. Copyright Office, September 12, 2022. https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2022/09/find-video-games-in-copyright/
Nintendo of America. Mario Bros. Arcade Sales Flyer. 1983. Preserved by Arcade Flyers. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/1453
Nintendo. Mario Bros. European Arcade Sales Flyer. 1983. Preserved by Arcade Flyers. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/612
Nintendo of America. Mario Bros. Operation Manual. Model TMA1-UP/TMA1-UP-US. 1983. Preserved by the International Arcade Museum. https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-videogames/M/MarioBros.pdf
Nintendo of America. Mario Bros. Operation Manual. Alternate edition. 1983. Preserved by the International Arcade Museum. https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-videogames/M/MarioBros_2.pdf
Nintendo of America. Nintendo-Pak Installation & Operation Manual: Mario Bros. 1983. Preserved by the International Arcade Museum. https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-videogames/M/marioborspak.pdf
Iwata, Satoru, and Shigeru Miyamoto. “The Reason Mario Wears Overalls.” Iwata Asks: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Nintendo. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/nsmb/0/1/
Iwata, Satoru, and Shigeru Miyamoto. “I Saw a Pipe on the Way Home from the Office.” Iwata Asks: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Nintendo. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/nsmb/0/2/
Iwata, Satoru, and Shigeru Miyamoto. “Letting Everyone Know It Was a Good Mushroom.” Iwata Asks: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Nintendo. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Iwata-Asks/Iwata-Asks-New-Super-Mario-Bros-Wii/Volume-1/4-Letting-Everyone-Know-It-Was-A-Good-Mushroom/4-Letting-Everyone-Know-It-Was-A-Good-Mushroom-210863.html
Iwata, Satoru, Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Toshihiko Nakago. “The Grand Culmination.” Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary. Nintendo. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Iwata-Asks/Super-Mario-Bros-25th-Anniversary/Vol-5-Original-Super-Mario-Developers/3-The-Grand-Culmination/3-The-Grand-Culmination-212856.html
Iwata, Satoru, Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Toshihiko Nakago. “Using the D-Pad to Jump.” Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary. Nintendo. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/0/
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “Super Mario Bros.” Family Computer Software Archive. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/jp/famicom/software/smb1/index.html
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “Super Mario Bros.” Mario Portal: History. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/jp/character/mario/en/history/smb/index.html
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “History of Super Mario.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/us/explore/characters/mario/history/
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “Nintendo History: 1980–1990.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Hardware/Nintendo-History/Nintendo-History-625945.html
Nintendo Co., Ltd. “Nintendo Classic Mini: NES Special Interview, Volume 1, Donkey Kong.” 2016. https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/News/2016/November/Nintendo-Classic-Mini-NES-special-interview-Volume-1-Donkey-Kong-1152552.html
Iwata, Satoru. “30 Years of Luigi.” Iwata Asks: New Super Luigi U. Nintendo. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wiiu/new-super-luigi-u/0/1/
“New Equipment: Nintendo Introduces Mario Bros.” Cash Box, July 9, 1983. Preserved by World Radio History. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/80s/1983/CB-1983-07-09.pdf
“Mario Bros.” Cash Box, August 20, 1983. Preserved by World Radio History. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/80s/1983/CB-1983-08-20.pdf
Video Games. July 1983. Preserved by the Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/subjects/40?page=955
Electronic Fun with Computers & Games. July 1983. Preserved by the Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/2190
Electronic Games. August 1983. Preserved by the Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/70
The Video Game Update. July 1983. Preserved by the Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/19109
Atari, Inc. “Mario Bros.” Atari Age, November 1983–February 1984. Preserved by the Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/5230
Atari, Inc. Mario Bros. Atari 2600 Game Program Instructions. 1983. https://atarionline.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/mario-bros-1983-atari-2600-game-instructions-manual.pdf
Atari, Inc. Mario Bros. Atari 5200 Game Manual. 1983. Transcription preserved by AtariAge. https://www.atariage.com/manual_html_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=634
Miyamoto, Shigeru. Interview in Game Maestro. 2000. Translated by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/miyamoto2000/
Miyamoto, Shigeru. “Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto on the Origins of Nintendo’s Famous Characters.” Interview by WNYC. WNYC. https://wnyc.org/story/qa-shigeru-miyamoto-on-the-origins-of-nintendos-famous-characters/
“Donkey Kong.” The Strong National Museum of Play. World Video Game Hall of Fame. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/games/donkey-kong/
International Arcade Museum. “Mario Bros.” Museum of the Game. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/mario-bros
Centre for Computing History. “Nintendo Game & Watch Mario Bros.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/40320/Nintendo-Game-Watch-Mario-Bros/
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., 746 F.2d 112 (2d Cir. 1984). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/746/112/30961/
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., 615 F. Supp. 838 (S.D.N.Y. 1985). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/615/838/1515073/
Altice, Nathan. I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer/Entertainment System Platform. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262028776/i-am-error/
Sheff, David. Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World. New York: Random House, 1993. https://www.davidsheff.com/game-over
Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/UHV/ultimate-history-of-video-games/
Ryan, Jeff. Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011. https://www.si.edu/object/super-mario-how-nintendo-conquered-america-jeff-ryan%3Asiris_sil_1083966
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “Nintendo Entertainment System Video Game Console.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_1436726