'Super Mario Bros.' on the NES may look quaint now, but 35 years ago, it was a groundbreaking achievement.
It effectively rewrote the rules for platform games, and all of it done with a minimal amount of memory. Want to know how little memory? See this webpage you're on right now? It's about 3MB in size. The whole game of 'Super Mario Bros.' was 31KB.
That means that 'Super Mario Bros.' is approximately 100 times smaller than this very page. That means that the developers had to reuse things as much as possible. For example, the clouds in the sky are actually the bushes in the ground - just with a different colour. Likewise, Mario and Luigi look the same except for a colour swap.
This, however, was pretty much unheard of until now and it's kind of amazing to think that a game that's close to 35 years old is still revealing secrets after all this time.
Take a look.
Why you son of a.... 😳👏🏾 https://t.co/MudpOvwiY3
— Funk Butcher (@FunkButcher) April 17, 2020