Super Mario Bros. - The Game that Saved Video Games

While the Nintendo Entertainment System may have been the console that bounced the video game industry back when it crashed in 1983, a console is nothing without its "killer app"; a game that people want so badly that they buy the system specifically to play it. Yes, the NES is a great system, but it would be nothing without Super Mario Bros. - The Game that Saved Video Games.

Super Mario Bros. may not be the first platformer, but it's by far the most successful and the archetype that all games in the genre that would follow. The brainchild of legendary video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, the concept evolved from his 1981 creation Donkey Kong, a single screen platformer arcade game and Mario's debut (then called Jump Man).Miyamoto continued perfecting his single screen platformer designs with arcade classics Donkey Kong Junior (1982) and Popeye (1882) until finally moving Mario into his own game, Mario Bros. and adding a brother, Luigi, who served as the second player character.

After Mario, Miyamoto started work on his very first console title for the Nintendo Famicom (the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System), with a Pac-Man style maze game, Devil World (1984). On Devil World Miyamoto supervised a newbie, Takashi Tezuka, who would build out Miyamoto's designs and concepts as well as design sections of the game himself. While Devil World was a maze game and not a platformer, it did lead to some Mario influences in monster and minion designs, plus it establish the collaborative game designs of Miyamoto and Tezuka who continue their work together today.

The next game for the team was the historic Super Mario Bros., with Miyamoto creating the overall primary concepts and designs, and Tezuka crafting them into a reality. The title brought together elements from all of Miyamoto's previous single screen platformers, only instead of all the action happening on a single screen the game scrolled, opening up an entire world for the Brothers to traverse.