Game of the Week: The Wonderful influence of Super Mario 3

I was about halfway through Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which is our game of the week, when I realised that Mario looked particularly familiar. Mario always looks familiar of course - it's Mario! The hat, the dungarees, the moustache. But something about this Mario really reminded me of a specific Mario I'd seen before. The Mario of Super Mario Bros. 3!

And this in turn made me think about the lasting influence of this glorious old game, an influence which I realise can be seen quite clearly in many of the Marios that have come since - not least Super Mario Wonder.

It's tempting to think that the main influence on all the 2D Marios is the first proper platformer, Super Mario Bros. It's a great game and introduces so much that the series has still kept around, but when I think back to it I also think how much things have changed. I remember longish levels, and a relatively slow trickle of new ideas. It was the best platformer of its age, but when I play it now I can also see that it's of its age - albeit in the sense that it helped define what games of that period could be if they were really, really good.