Super Mario Bros. 3 was created to be the ultimate NES Mario experience. Released in 1988 in Japan, and 1989-1990 in the USA. Super Mario Bros. 3 has become synonomous with the NES. It's cultural, gaming, and social impact, cannot be underestimated. Super Mario Bros. was the "Bleach" to this one's "Nevermind".

The game, in the USA, was first shown to us in a made-for-TV movie called "The Wizard", about an autistic kid who wants to travel to california to compete in a Nintendo game competition. He runs off, with his brother and a female side character, getting into all sorts of crazy situations, including the famous "PowerGlove" scene (it's so baaaaaaad! ~ I mean it stinks!). What was basically yet another long term Nintendo commercial a step up from Captain N! Anyway, as we reach the end of the movie **SPOILER ALERT**, the final game in the competition is Super Mario Bros. 3, brand spankin' new, not even on the market in the USA yet. I believe that's the true item this movie was to push beyond all others.

In Super Mario Bros. 3, the Mushroom Land has now been expanded into the "Mushroom World" that connsists of 8 lands: Grass LAnd, Desert Land/Hill, The Ocean, Giant Land, Sky Land, Ice Land, Pipe Maze, and Dark Land (Koopa's Hideout). The initial quest is to free the magic wands from the 8 Koopa Kids (all references to celebrities such as Morton "Downey Jr." Koopa, Wendy-O "Williams" Koopa, or Iggy "Pop" Koopa), and save the Mushroom World from King Koopa and his Koopa Kids. The game expanded beyond left to right side scrolling action and had vertical, horizontal, and diagonal scrolling. It also featured a larger roster of power-ups, many secrets to explore, several "luck" based things to gain more power-ups at, and a huge lot of enemies.

Super Mario Bros. 3 was a huge release, and at it's release, it was hit with another challenge in obtaining it at the time - a chip shortage. With Memory Chip shortage and high demand for Mario's latest adventure, this game could get pricey brand new, as high as $80 (what we paid for mine in December 1991). Just to indicate how GOOD this game is, it's a plentiful as Combat for the Atari 2600 and in that case is one of the easiest and cheapest to get ahold of, but unlike Combat, this is a very high quality NES game.

Before the dawn of Super Mario Bros., you had a handful of mascots from the Arcade that got some home appreciation on a level to become a household name, with the closest match being Pac-Man. Mario was my generations' "Pac-Man", universally loved, universally wanted, universally appreciated. Mario was THE THING to have back then.

Mario did not really become a household name until probably about 1987 or 1988 though, which is when the NES I believe became affordable for most people to adopt them over the United States. That's when kids at school - which is a big part of this - would talk about Mario all the time. And that's when the merchandising and cartoons really took off as well, with the Super Mario Bros. Super Show.

Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World were the PEAK of Mario Mania in the USA. When Super Mario Bros. 3 came out I remember giving people a deadpan stare at age 7-8 because I did not know what in the hell they were talking about. I had an ATARI 2600 at home! in 1989. On a Black & White J.C. Penney TV. My "Mario" was Pitfall Harry. My "Zelda" was the square from Adventure. My version of "Tetris" was Pac-Man. But my god, kids would bring the strategy guides, Nintendo Power, and everything else to school. That's about all you'd hear about in my circles of gamer kids for the first couple years of the 1990's was Super Mario Bros. 3, unless they were the rare Sonic kid with a Genesis, or the even rarer TurboGrafix kid with whatever that football game was everyone wanted. Us Millennials, we were the O.G. generation that STARTED parents "nEeDiNg" to buy us basically...useless crap...to placate our social lives at school, whether it was Air Jordans, or a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3. "Did you see the Wizard" - no, but I have a commercial for a 1985 episode on a VHS tape full of Muppet Babies episodes we taped when I was a baby! (entirely different Wizard BTW).

I rented the game from Blockbuster in 1990 to play it and to see what it would be like, and needless to say, playing this was a unique experience at the time. We went from the turnip toss that was Mario 2, and the basic mechanics of 1985's Super Mario Bros., to this diagonal scrolling, backtrack capable wonder with a mocodum of power-ups, so many you could spend years playing this and not run into them all, and even at least one not even mentioned in the manual (the Hammer Suit). It felt easier than the original to play and get further in, but it also held a mix of adventure, daring, and most importantly, it was spooky. Seriously, SMB3 holds some genetic roots for Five Nights at Freddy's as this was the game that introduced us to the "Boo" family consisting of Boo Diddly (an obivous rip on the Rock N' Roll singer and guitarist Bo Diddly), and "Stretch" - a long white block with a ghost head popping out of both sides. It seems Miyamoto and his team pulled all the stops on this one looking back except Yoshi.

So of course I wanted Super Mario Bros. 3, but two problems. First, it was almost as impossible to get ahold of as Super Mario Bros. 2 (which always seems to be made of unobtainium), and to add insult to injury, the price was $80. $50, or even $30 was expensive to my "allowance" at the time. I can't remember if I actually saved for $80, got it as a gift, but I remember sitting in the food court of Peachtree Mall with my newly acquired $80 Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge excited to take it home and play it.

And this game was FULL of secrets. It was maybe the first time I ever sat down with a video game without me attempting to beat it. I could spend HOURS exploring levels once I figured out tricks to accumulate power-ups and extra lives to continue playing this game. And what we knew, we traded in the school yard, what we did not know, we learned from others in the school yard.

It was a "communal" thing and was probably right at the tail end of it being a really big social thing without some sort of siloing going on, without needing a "label". Before the term "Gamer" was a thing. At that time, pretty much all boys ages 5-21 were considered "gamers", but not with the label, they were just "my lazy bastard son who won't do his homework or chores and plays those stupid time-waster Nintendo games that mean nothing and teach him nothing!!!". This was every Boomer or older Xer parent I knew. I mean, this was such a thing, that even The Far Side made fun of it! The only thing that makes the joke funnier is it actually did come true, I'm sure there IS an opening as a "Super Mario Bros. 3 Expert" for prize money now in "E-Sports" as they call it (competitive video gaming, whcih SMB3 kind of had a part in via The Wizard anyway).

I mean, every one of us could probably list a time back then when we were a "Mario Fanboy". You'd wake up, grab your Super Mario Bros Lunchbox (and hid a game book with the strategy guide in it), to go to school and get a diciplinary notice for talking about Super Mario with your classmates. Spend all of lunch trading tricks, tips, secrets, and made up b.s. about the game with ach other - fueling excitement to go home and try that stuff out and see what is true. Then you'd get on the bus, play your Game Boy with Super Mario Land oro Super Mario Land 2 on it to get your Mario Fix, then get home, watch Captain N and the new Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, do your homework, then eat dinner and harass your paraents about Mario till they tell you they are sick of hearing about Mario, then go and play Nintendo for the next several hours, digging around for all the secrets. Oh yeah, and since your balls had not dropped yet....it was time to grab that hint book and binge out on Mario till the flashlight goes dead, the parents come up and tell you to go to sleep, or you pass out drooling on screenshots while dreaming about Mario Levels that don't exist. Welcome to being 7-14 circa 1990!

The social aspect cannot be understated. One other thing we used to do, in my sister's collegate neighborhood, where eeveryone had an NES with SMB3 pretty much, was we would play the game at each other's houses, usually accumulating other kids along the way, and have these huge group play sessions that included one of us reading the strategy guide, and the others all giving secrets and instructions and whatnot, while 2 people played in 2-player mode - until the parents kicked us out ("aw, c'mon, it's sunny and nice outside, can't you just go play outside? Get some exericise? Vitamin D?"), whereupon we'd just go to the next kid's house until we ran out of houses to hang out at, which by then it was dusk, so we'd just go home, lol.

And this game arrived just in time for a slurry of Nintendo Merch and product placement. In the mmovie Beethoven's 2nd, we see the kids playing Super Mario Bros. 3 with a power glove. In the movie "Driving Me Crazy" we watch Gene Wilder play Super Mario Brother 3 calling it a "Carroulous Waste of Time". And of course, one component that can bring out hilarious whack-a-doo maniacal chaos in the game for an eternity....the Galoob Game Genie "game enhancer", lol.

Then in 1991, Super Mario World and the SNES came out, and that's when Mario 3's "hype" started to fade a bit, now replaced by the 16-bit SNES's new stuff, but even then, SMW owes a LOT to SMB3 as it started oout as a SNES port of SMB3 originally when in design and testing (something we only figured out recently via YouTube).

Super Mario Bros. 3 + Game Genie = ENTERTAINMENT FOR DAYS! As I discovered when I got older and got my hands on one. The game is so complex and there's so many things to effect in the game that you could do everything from the typical "Cheater" stuff like infinite lives or a cache of P-wings, all the way to screwing up the music, conjuring up Toad screaming gibberish at the beginning of every level. I did this a lot in my 20's, particuarly when I found a file called "mario.txt" with one guys self-made Game Genie codes for Super Mario Bros. 1-3 for the NES and all the crazy effects, glitch levels, and mass-hilarity that could be conjured up by it.

In 2001, as a member of a video productions class at my high school, I made my first video, which included my own self-made codes (mario.txt did not exist at that time). This was sort of the prototype of winters on my YouTube channel where I'd record myself playing with multiple codes. Except on this one it was filled with cringey teenage narration and recorded over a religious VHS tape with a blank cover I drew my own cover art on.

By 2006, SMG3 was one of my main gotos for Game Genie corruption videos and apparently,I was somewhat influential in the "Corruption community" at that tiem wiht my "Game Genie Krazy Kodez" video series. So much so people have actually mentioned me by screenname on their newer videos using more sophisticated techniques.