After the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo revived the home console industry with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Mario Bros. in 1985. Over thirty years later, Super Mario remains the flagship series for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS.
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Super Mario Bros. wasn’t the first platforming video game, but it was by far the most successful, and established the archetype that all other games in the genre would follow. The brainchild of legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, the concept for Super Mario Bros. evolved from his 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong, a single-screen platformer that first introduced players to Mario (then called Jump Man).
Miyamoto continued to perfect his single-screen platformer designs with the arcade classics Donkey Kong Junior (1982) and Popeye (1982) before giving Mario his own title. 1983's Mario Bros. featured cooperative gameplay and introduced Mario's brother, Luigi, who served as a second player. Although Mario's original profession was to be a carpenter, the brothers became plumbers, battling evil turtles that emerge from drain pipes.
After Mario Bros., Miyamoto began work on his first ever console title for the Nintendo Famicom (the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System), a Pac-Man-style maze game called Devil World (1984). Miyamoto supervised a new developer, Takashi Tezuka, who would flesh out Miyamoto's designs and concepts as well as design portions of the game itself. While Devil World was not a platformer, it did have a significant influence on the villain designs in the Mario games.
