Trivia / Mario Bros.

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• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: In the first Nintendo Direct focusing on The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Chris Pratt (who voices Mario in the film) makes a comment about "stomping Koopas in the original Mario Bros. arcade game". The turtle enemies in this game are Shellcreepers, not Koopas, and you don't stomp on them to defeat them.
• First Appearance: Of Luigi.^note Sort of. Luigi technically appeared first in a Game & Watch game that was released four months before this one and was also named Mario Bros., even though it's a completely different game. It can be assumed, however, that the development on this game started earlier. Most official sources prefer to point to this game as Luigi's debut.
• Killer App: Mario Bros. was a huge seller for the Famicom in Japan. The fact that the console got a nearly Arcade-Perfect Port of a then-recent arcade game made a big impact on Japanese gamers. Outside of Japan, the port's popularity was more muted due to being released after Super Mario Bros..
• Milestone Celebration: Nintendo declared the year 2013 "The Year of Luigi" to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Luigi's debut in this game.
• Port Overdosed:
  • Aside from Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. is Nintendo's most-ported game ever, being one of the very few games to be on the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800. It was also ported to virtually every home computer of the era and has been re-released many times since then, as an embedded game in Super Mario Bros. 3, a minigame in the Super Mario Advance series (and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga), a swipeable card-loading version for the short-lived e-Reader, and a Virtual Console release (the later two being ports of the NES version).
  • The arcade game proper didn't get a re-release until for the Nintendo Switch under the Arcade Archives series.^note ported, published, and distributed by Hamster—known for its Neo Geo ports for the same system—under license.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Mario Bros. was released just as Nintendo was readying the launch of the Famicom in Japan, and thus the graphics and gameplay elements were deliberately kept simple so it could be ported to the new console easily. As a knock-on effect, ports of the game, even on systems as archaic as the Atari 2600, suffer far fewer compromises than ports of other Nintendo games like the Donkey Kong series and Popeye.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The original arcade version may or may not be one of the games that was developed by Ikegami Tsushinki^note A maker of professional broadcasting equipment and TV cameras who sued Nintendo, claiming rights to the source code for Donkey Kong, and who (successfully) claimed that Nintendo illegally used that code to develop Donkey Kong Junior, and possibly other games, including Mario Bros. on Nintendo's behalf. In any case, it has since been both averted and subverted; averted, since it's now getting a console re-release for first time, and subverted, because it's not coming from Nintendo themselves. Instead, it's coming from a third party as an officially licensed product, in this case, a company called Hamster, who has ported the game and is releasing it under the previously mentioned Arcade Archives series.^note And who likely made their own deal with Ikegami, assuming it actually was them who made the original arcade version

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