Koji Kondo's soundtrack is one of the earliest and most popular in video games, making music a centerpiece of game design. It is credited alongside the NES as one of the key factors in reviving the video game industry after the 1983 crash, and helped popularize the side-scrolling platform game genre.

It has been rereleased on most Nintendo systems, and is one of the bestselling games of all time, with more than 58 million copies sold worldwide. is frequently cited as one of the greatest video games of all time, and is particularly admired for its precise controls.

The design of the first level, World 1-1, serves as a tutorial for platform gameplay. The game was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka as 'a grand culmination' of the Famicom team's three years of game mechanics and programming, drawing from their experiences working on Devil World and the side-scrollers Excitebike and Kung Fu to advance their previous work on platforming ' athletic games' such as Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. They traverse side-scrolling stages while avoiding hazards such as enemies and pits with the aid of power-ups such as the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Starman. Players control Mario, or his brother Luigi in the multiplayer mode, as they traverse the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool from King Koopa (later named Bowser). The NES version received a wide release in North America that year and in PAL regions in 1987. Following a limited US release for the NES, it was ported to international arcades for the Nintendo Vs. and the first game in the Super Mario series, it was first released in 1985 for the Famicom in Japan. The successor to the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. is a platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

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