20 Incredibly Important Video Games That Shaped The Industry

2. Super Mario Bros.

Why It Is Important: Super Mario Bros. revived the dying gaming industry with its incredible side-scrolling platforming gameplay that rewrote the book on game design. In the early 1980s the video game market became over-saturated. Suddenly everyone wanted a slice of the video game pie and consumers were bombarded with new consoles and games from left, right and centre. A distinct lack of quality control led to some downright terrible games seeing the light of day like E.T. and the piss poor Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. People began to lose faith and by 1983 the industry shrank to a fraction of the size it was a few years earlier. It was on life support. And along came Nintendo. In a characteristically ballsy move, the Japanese company single-handedly brought the industry back from the dead (without resorting to zombie curses) with the release of their NES console. It came bundled with a little game called Super Mario Bros.. It wasn't the first side-scroller, but it polished and refined everything about it. The physics of Mario's first platforming adventure created a new sense of momentum. His gradual acceleration when the run button was held down allowed players to control the length and height of his jumps. It was the perfect marriage of design and technology, as the NES's controller (its directional pad, in particular) offered an unrivalled level of precision. The pitch-perfect controls meshed seamlessly with the fantastic level design that encouraged experimentation and exploration. Who can forget finding the warp zone in world 1-2 for the first time just by messing around? There were similar little secrets scattered throughout the game like invisible blocks that housed 1-ups and invincibility stars and plants that ascended to the clouds. Super Mario Bros. re-wrote the book on game design with its use of physics, its secrets and its subtle depth. Its world and its rules were so easily defined and understood yet they were always flexible and never rigid. You could play in a way that was fun for you. Speeding through levels was just as viable a strategy as taking as a slow and steady approach to collect every coin and break every block. This was the start of Mario's rise to becoming one of gaming's most beloved mascots who continues to star in amazing games today, 29 years after his first outing showed how fun jumping on Goombas could be.