Play Mario Games!

Mario is one of my favorite games online.  I remember staying up many nights playing it for hours and hours.

Mario games info

Mario games features two plumbers, Mario and Luigi, having to investigate the sewers of New York after strange creatures have been appearing down there. The objective of the game is to defeat all of the enemies in each phase. The mechanics of Mario games involve only running and jumping. Unlike future Mario games, players cannot jump on enemies and squash them, unless they were already turned on their back. Each phase is a series of platforms with four pipes at each corner of the screen (in the old version along with an object called a “POW” block in the center). Both sides of every phase feature a mechanism that allows the player to go off-screen to the left and appear on the right and vice versa.

The player gains points by defeating multiple enemies consecutively and can participate in a bonus round to gain more points. Enemies are defeated by kicking them over once they have been flipped on their back. This is accomplished by hitting the platform the enemy is on directly beneath them. If the player allows too much time to pass after doing this, the enemy will flip itself back over, changing in color and increasing speed. Each phase has a certain number of enemies, with the final enemy being faster and a different color than normal. There are three enemies in all: the Shellcreeper, which simply walks around; the Sidestepper, which requires one more hit than normal to take down; and the Fighter Fly, which jumps, making it more difficult to flip. Players may also make use of the above-mentioned “POW” block, which flips any enemy touching a platform when a player hits the block from below.

Mario games was created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi, two of the lead developers for the video game Donkey Kong. In Donkey Kong, Mario dies if he falls too far. Yokoi suggested to Miyamoto that he should be able to fall from any height, which Miyamoto was not sure of, thinking that it would make it “not much of a game.” He eventually agreed, thinking it would be okay for him to have some super-human abilities. He designed a prototype that had Mario “jumping and bouncing around”, which he was satisfied with. The element of combating enemies from below was introduced after Yokoi suggested it, observing that it would work since there were multiple floors. However, it proved to be too easy to eliminate enemies this way, which the developers fixed by requiring players to touch the enemies after they’ve been flipped to defeat them. This was also how they introduced the turtle as an enemy, which they conceived as an enemy that could only be hit from below. Because of Mario’s appearance in Donkey Kong with overalls, a hat, and a thick moustache, Shigeru Miyamoto thought that he should be a plumber as opposed to a carpenter, and designed this game to reflect that. Another contributing factor was the game’s setting: it was a large network of giant pipes, so they felt a change in occupation was necessary for him.