“When We Met Mario: Remembering Our Earliest Mario Memories”
9 min read
Nearly everyone remembers the first time they experienced a Mario game, whether a standard platformer or a kart racer. So we asked our writers a simple question: “What is your first Mario memory?”
For me, it was all about the Regular Nintendo. I do remember some vague imagery encountering a Mario Bros. (sans the Super) arcade cabinet at my local haunt: a ShowBiz Pizza, but the NES was where I cut my teeth. I know that’ll be a common answer for many of us silverbacks here at The Pixels, but it’s a good one! I learned hand-eye coordination, physics (the floaty kind), innate tutorialization, power-ups, secrets, speedrunning, and the wonders of using your imagination to fill in the gaps in lore all from that first Super Mario Bros. game.
I also quite nearly developed an insane gaming habit from that game. I remember an adult pointing out that I lifted the controller whenever I had to make Mario jump over a pit. Hahaha, imagine if that’s what I still did today. Maybe motion controls truly are intuitive.
–Red
It’s no secret that I grew up a Sega kid, so never had much exposure to the Mario games until much later (I’m talking emulator in college around 2003). That said, my mum’s friends’ kids were Nintendo kids and, upon a visit to their house one rainy weekend in the 90s, set up on their massive TV, was the damndest thing I’d ever seen – a Nintendo Entertainment System!
Well, they showed me the one game they had for it, a colourful, kinda neat platformer called Super Mario Bros 2. It starred those two mustachioed blokes I’d seen in the ads, as well as a princess and a dude that was a mushroom, and together they beat up little guys in masks, dug up turnips and, er, beat up a dinosaur with a trumpetty mouth, it was pretty damn cool!
Needless to say, SMB2 made that visit really interesting, so I’ll always thank it for that!
Sonic was better though 🤭
My first Mario memory will probably sound very generic because I was one of the lucky kids who got a Nintendo64 from Santa on Christmas morning. My parents got my sister and me a Nintendo console because it was very family-friendly. With the console, we also unwrapped Diddy Kong Racing and, of course, Super Mario 64. I remember struggling to find the power stars and getting lost in the castle. Of course, my dad was the first one to finish the game, come to think of it I’m pretty sure that’s the last game he completed. Seeing my dad get to the final big power star gave me the inspiration to go on and finish the game myself.
Maybe I wouldn’t be the same gamer that I am today without Super Mario 64 or possibly my taste in genres would be different. Either way, I’m glad that one of my first gaming experiences was with Mario because that’s where my love for platformers truly began, Super Mario 64 would eventually lose to Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 on my list of favorite platformers but it will always have a special place in my heart (right next to the bear, bird, and gorilla).
I didn’t have a console of my own until high school, during the GameCube era, but I met Mario well before then. I spent a lot of time around my cousins growing up – I had several that were close to my age and lived nearby. And the first time I went to their house after Christmas one year, they were eager to show me their new gifts.
That year, they got a Nintendo 64.
Shortly thereafter, there he was on the screen: bright red cap, big nose, and classic ‘stache, saying “hello!” in that trademark Italian accent. From the first, I found Mario bright, cheerful, and warm. (Maybe that explains why I like Sunshine so much?) He became a staple of those visits – whenever we got the cousins together for a birthday, a holiday, or just for an afternoon to play, Mario would inevitably come out in some form. We’d take turns at Mario 64, passing the controller around whenever someone either got a star or lost a life. Short turns (my youngest cousin loved the Princess’s Secret Slide), long turns (oh gosh, the 100-coin hunts), it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to be playing to enjoy myself – I often chose to pass my own turn, even, content to backseat and watch my cousins hunt for new things or show me their latest discoveries, rather than wrestle with unfamiliar controls. Regardless of whether we were the ones actually piloting Mario at any given moment, we were exploring a castle, worlds within paintings, and we were doing it together. That was the fun part.
Even once we’d collectively exhausted Mario 64 of its secrets, he still was an integral part of my time with my cousins. Mario Party, Mario Kart 64, and Paper Mario all had their day in the sun for us. I’ll freely admit it’s those memories that get me excited when I see a new Mario game on the horizon – and I still find him just as warm and welcoming as I did then.
-Linguistic Dragon
I was more of a Sonic Kid myself but my first memories of Mario are much more vague than Sonic because I’m pretty sure Mario has been around in my mind a bit longer than Sonic has. Truth be told, I can’t remember my first Mario memory for certain because Mario has been in my life for as long as I can remember. There are a few possibilities though: It could be either Super Mario 64, Super Mario Allstars on SNES, or it could be Super Mario Bros. 2 on GameBoy Advance. I don’t know where these memories fall in place on my mental timeline, but these early memories represent a time of frustration because I wasn’t very good at games yet. I remember having admiration for my father because he was a pro in my eyes.
Mario has brought my family together many many times over the years. Those first memories play a small role because as I grew to play Mario games again and again, they proved to form bonds. To me, my friendship with my sister aged like wine over the years, Mario Kart plays a significant role in that amongst other things. I’m very thankful for all of those experiences.
In the late 80s, I played Super Mario Bros. on an arcade cabinet at a local swimming pool more than I swam in the pool itself. I remember finding out about the World 1-2 level skip from a cool guy that was trying to impress a girl who was watching. They got married three years later, and that is how my uncle Jim and aunt Sherri met.
As a kid born in the late 80s, my first Mario memory is of the original Super Mario Bros. I don’t remember if it was my first game but my earliest memory is of me playing the NES and having a bundle of games to choose from. It was already late in the NES’s lifecycle so I had plenty of games to choose from so SMB itself didn’t seem that special to me. It took me a while to realize that it was a game I kept coming back to time and time again, more so than the others. I eventually discovered that there was an SMB 2 and 3 and I just had to do everything in my power to get my mom to buy them for me as well! Decades later, the Mario series is still one of my favorites of all time and are usually a day-one purchase for me!
In my formative years, I played games on my parents’ Amstrad CPC, with simple but amazing platform games such as Dizzy and Rainbow Islands amongst others. My younger self appreciated the challenge these games offered in jumping, collecting and puzzle solving.
Then one day I stumbled across a TV show by the name of Super Mario Challenge. This was a game show where contestants raced to beat levels or collect a certain number of coins in levels from the NES Mario games. This was honestly my The Wizard moment. Seeing these NES games was something completely mind-blowing! Jumping on the heads of enemies.. sometimes two or three in a row without touching the ground! I was absolutely stunned by this.
When Christmas rolled around and my mum got me an NES with SMB, Duck Hunt, and SMB2… I don’t think my childhood self was ever as happy as in that very moment!
It’s hard to bring up the specific details, but I do recall this story starting around Fall of 1992. I was 5 years old at the time and I started senior kindergarten. My dad was out of a job as an insurance broker and we lost our first house as part of the fallout. We ended up living at my dad’s older sister’s place and he took a job running the night shift at his elder brother’s burgeoning manufacturing plant. In between watching Ninja Turtles and the Blue Jays winning the first of back-to-back World Series Championships, there was one other show that captured my attention – The Super Mario Bros. Super Show.
I remember coming home after school (kindergarten was half day back in those days), running to that huge 27” Toshiba CRT with the wood paneling and switching it on to channel 25. Sometime during the afternoon, between 2 and 4 pm, the show would come on and I’d be enamoured. The live bits were funny, even though I understood little of what was going on, and the cartoons were zany and so much fun to watch. It was also my introduction to The Legend of Zelda, but that’s a story for another time.
So, here’s the scenario that would play out: I would watch the show, and the very next day when I was playing with friends, we would pretend to be Super Mario characters and have all sorts of adventures. My love for the show, coupled with the intense marketing push from Nintendo, must’ve come through to my dad, because he went and bought me an NES for Christmas that year. Even though we weren’t making a lot and I’d only see him in the afternoons before he would go to work, he still got it for me. That NES came packaged with Super Mario Bros. 3, my first ever video game and the catalyst for my love of video games ever since.
But Bizzaro was right though, Sonic was better 😀.
I was in kindergarten when my dad brought home the regular Nintendo and a 3-in-1 cartridge that included Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Track & Field. He showed me how to play and gave me the controller. Long story short, Mario had me from the first mushroom. Working through level 1-1 for the first time felt like such a huge adventure. “Wait, I can press down and go through pipes? There are INVISIBLE blocks? Wait, I can kick turtle shells??” And then, when I finally found the flag pole at the end of the level, I remember my dad cheering for me. Then he said, “Let’s see how you do in level 2!” I was stunned it kept going!
And boy, did it. Back then, I had no concept of how levels worked, or how long games should be. I just played and tried to get further than the last time. The lack of save states and frequent game-overs turned me into a video game wizard. Like every other kid my age, I learned to flawlessly navigate the early levels, take warp pipes, and bounce to the harder, later levels– only to die and have to do it all over again.
What I think I remember most was how this cycle taught me a lot about success, failure, and training. Dad kept this in the forefront of my mind (especially when I would throw the controller in frustration!). “Failure is part of the process,” he would say. “Look how good you’ve gotten at the early levels you used to think were hard. Keep at it!” So I did. And I eventually saved the princess (only to unlock the harder version of the game, but that’s another story). For me, my first Mario experience was a life lesson from my dad, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
