Super Mario Bros. 3 is a 1988 platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was released in Japan on October 23, 1988, in North America on February 12, 1990, and in Europe on August 29, 1991. It was developed by Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development, led by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka.
Players control brothers Mario or Luigi, who must save Princess Toadstool and the rulers of seven different kingdoms from the villain, Bowser. As in previous Super Mario games, they defeat enemies by stomping on them or using items that bestow magical powers; they also have new abilities, including flight and sliding down slopes. Super Mario Bros. 3 introduced Super Mario staples such as Bowser's children (the Koopalings) and a world map to transition between levels.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was praised for its challenging gameplay. It is regarded as one of the greatest video games and the greatest title ever released on the platform. It is the third best-selling NES game, with more than 17 million copies sold worldwide. It inspired an animated television series, produced by DIC Entertainment. It was advertised during a final scene of the 1989 film The Wizard.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was remade for the Super NES as a part of Super Mario All-Stars in 1993 and for the Game Boy Advance as Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 in 2003. It was rereleased on the Virtual Console service on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, and included on the NES Classic Mini. In 2018, it was rereleased for the Switch on the Nintendo Classics service with added netplay.
Gameplay
Super Mario Bros. 3 is a two-dimensional side-scrolling platform game in which the player controls either Mario or Luigi. It shares similar gameplay mechanics with previous games in the series Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, and Super Mario Bros. 2 while introducing several elements. In addition to the running and jumping found in previous games, the player character can slide down slopes, pick up and throw certain items, and freely climb vines. New power-ups are introduced, including the Super Leaf and the Tanooki Suit, which allow Mario to fly and float. The game world consists of eight kingdoms, each subdivided into multiple levels. The eight worlds feature distinct visual themes: the first world is grass and the second world, "Desert Land" (or "Desert Hill" in Japanese and North American PRG0 versions), contains sand-covered levels with pyramids, while the levels in the fourth world, "Giant Land" ("Big Island"), contain obstacles and enemies twice their normal height and width.
The player navigates via two game screens: an overworld map and a course. The overworld map displays an overhead representation of the current kingdom and has several paths leading from the world's entrance to a castle. Paths connect to action panels, fortresses, and other map icons, and allow players to take different routes to reach the kingdom's goal. Moving the on-screen character to an action panel or fortress will allow access to that course, a linear stage populated with obstacles and enemies. The majority of the game takes place in these levels, with the player traversing the stage by dashing, jumping, flying, swimming, and dodging or defeating enemies. Players start with a certain number of lives and may gain additional lives by picking up green spotted 1-Up mushrooms hidden in bricks, or by collecting 100 coins, among other methods. Mario and Luigi lose a life if they take damage while small, fall into lava or a bottomless pit, or run out of time. The game ends when all lives are lost, although the player can continue from the beginning of the world they lost their last life in by selecting "Continue". If the player continues, all fortresses and enemy courses, as well as the tank and ship levels from the eighth world that the player previously completed will remain completed and any locked doors that were unlocked will also remain unlocked. This allows the player to continue from the last fortress level they completed in most cases. The player will also keep their items in their inventory.
Completing stages allows the player to progress through the overworld map and to succeeding worlds. Each world features a final stage with a boss to defeat. The first seven worlds feature an airship controlled by one of the Koopalings, while the player battles Bowser in his castle in the eighth world as the Final Boss. Other map icons include large boulders and locked doors that impede paths. Mini-games and bonus screens on the map provide the player a chance to obtain special power-ups and additional lives. Power-ups obtained in these mini-games are stored in a reserve, and can be activated by the player from the map screen.
In addition to special items from previous games like the Super Mushroom, Super Star, and the Fire Flower, new power-ups are introduced that provide the player with new options. The Super Leaf and Tanooki Suit give Mario raccoon and tanooki appearances respectively, allowing him to fly for a short period of time. The Tanooki Suit also enables him to turn into Statue Mario to avoid enemies for a short period of time. Changing into a Tanooki statue while jumping results in Mario pounding the ground and killing whatever enemies are directly under him; this is the first appearance of the now standard "ground pound" move in the Mario series. The new "Frog Suit" highly increases the character's underwater speed and agility, and boosts jumping height on land. Another new suit, the Hammer Suit, gives Mario the appearance of the Hammer Bro. enemy and allows him to throw hammers at enemies and resist fire attacks when crouching.
Super Mario Bros. 3 includes a multiplayer option which allows two players to play by taking turns at navigating the overworld map and accessing stage levels. The first player controls Mario, while the other controls Luigi (a palette swap of Mario). Through this mode, players can access several mini-games, including a remake of the original Mario Bros. arcade game, in which one player has the opportunity to steal the cards of another, but may lose their turn if they lose the mini-game.
Plot and characters
The plot of Super Mario Bros. 3 is described in the instruction booklet. In the Mushroom World, Bowser has his seven children, the Koopalings, conquer each of the seven kingdoms by stealing its king's magical wand and using it to transform him into an animal. Princess Toadstool receives news of Bowser's actions and dispatches Mario and Luigi to travel to each kingdom, retrieve the stolen wand, and restore its king to normal.
Mario and Luigi receive notes and special items from Toadstool after rescuing each of the first six kings. When they rescue the seventh king, they instead receive a note from Bowser, boasting that he has kidnapped Toadstool and imprisoned her within the castle of his own realm, Dark Land. The brothers travel through Dark Land, enter his castle, and defeat Bowser in a battle. The game ends with Princess Toadstool being freed from the castle.
According to Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Bros. 3 was conceived as a stage play. The title screen features a stage curtain being drawn open, and in the original NES version, in-game objects hang from off-screen catwalks, are bolted to the background, or cast shadows on the skyline. When Mario finishes a level, he walks off the stage.
Development and release
Beginning development shortly after the completion of the Famicom Disk System's Super Mario Bros. 2 in the spring of 1986, Super Mario Bros. 3 was developed by Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development, consisting of more than ten people. It took more than two years to complete. The development budget, when converted to US dollars, amounts to about $800,000 to ( adjusted for inflation). Shigeru Miyamoto was the director. He worked closely with the designers and programmers during the conceptual and final stages, encouraging a free interchange of ideas. Miyamoto considered intriguing and original ideas to be key to creating a successful game. Originally, the team intended to use an isometric perspective, but the developers found that this made it too difficult to position jumps, so returned to the 2D side view used in previous games. Some isometric elements remain, such as the checkered floor in the title screen. All pixel art was drawn using Fujitsu FM R-50 HD business computers while HP 64000 mainframe computers with a 6502 processor card were used to write and test code.
The game was designed to appeal to players of varying skill levels. To assist less skilled players, bonus coins and 1-ups are more abundant in earlier worlds, while later worlds present more complex challenges for experienced players. In the two-player mode, the players alternate turns to balance play time. The development team introduced new power-ups and concepts that would give Mario the appearance of different creatures as a means of providing him with new abilities. An early idea changed Mario into a centaur, but was dropped in favor of a raccoon tail with limited flying ability. Other costumes with different abilities were added to his repertoire, and levels were designed to take advantage of these abilities. New enemies were included to add diversity, along with variants of previous enemies such as Goombas, Hammer Bros., and Koopa Troopas. Due to the amount of new features the developers wanted to add, the initial early 1988 release date was pushed back by six months.
Some of the enemies designed for Super Mario Bros. 3 were inspired by the team's personal experiences. For example, the Chain Chomp enemy, a barking tethered ball and chain creature with eyes and teeth that lunges at the player when in close proximity, was drawn from Miyamoto's early life, in which a dog lunged at him, but was pulled away from him. Bowser's children, the Koopalings, were designed to be unique in appearance and personality; Miyamoto based the characters on seven of his programmers as a tribute to their work and efforts. Nintendo of America named the Koopalings after well-known musicians: for example, the characters "Ludwig von Koopa" and "Roy Koopa" are named after Ludwig van Beethoven and Roy Orbison respectively.
The character graphics were created with a special graphics machine ("Character Generator Computer Aided Design") that generated a collection of the graphical shapes. Shapes in the collection were assigned numbers that the code used to access and combine to form complete images on the screen in real time. The Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge uses Nintendo's custom MMC3 ASIC to enhance the NES' capabilities. The MMC3 chip allows for animated tiles, extra RAM for diagonal scrolling, and a scan line timer to split the screen. These functions are used to split the screen into a playfield on the top and a status bar on the bottom. On the overworld map, the status bar doubles as an inventory for items and power-ups. This allows the top portion to scroll as the character navigates the stage while the bottom portion remains static to display text and other information.
Like its predecessors, the music in Super Mario Bros. 3 was composed by Koji Kondo, who composed several new songs as well as returning melodies from Super Mario Bros. According to Kondo, who had composed the music in Super Mario Bros. based on what he believed fit the levels rather than focusing on composing a specific genre of music, Super Mario Bros. 3 was the most difficult game for him to compose. He experimented with several different genres of music, unsure of how to follow up the music from the first game after hearing from several people that it sounded like Latin or fusion music, and came up with several different melodies before settling on the final compositions. The team decided that music on the title screen was unnecessary.