That should be the actual title of this piece on investigating when Super Mario Brothers came out in the United States.
The NES, meanwhile, actually offered something resembling the arcade experience at home, or at least a reasonable facsimile. In the case of many of Nintendo’s own games, the hardware was literally the same as what was powering their arcade counterparts, meaning they were truly arcade-perfect.
How many times have I linked the NES and Old School consoles to arcade gaming? The entire definition of a video game console was to be the arcade experience at home. This actually began with the home version of PONG (PONG was an arcade game) and continued with the home versions of Space Invaders, Asteroids, and all that. Imagine people’s disappointment with the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man! It was nothing like the arcades!
A common theme in talking to Nintendo employees of the time is that if players just got their hands on the system, they’d be sold.
“We had a pretty strong belief that if we could get the consumer to try the product or experience the product, they would believe it was a new form of entertainment that they wanted to participate in,” Gail Tilden, who was in charge of the company’s PR and marketing at the time, once told me.
This is identical to how the Wii was sold. When the NES was introduced in America, they literally put the controller in people’s hands. The controller was radical because joysticks were what was common at the time. When the Wii was introduced, Nintendo also literally put the controller in people’s hands. And the Wii-mote was a radical change from the standard controller at the time.
This link I have illustrated in 2006 and keep repeating. Many people are unfortunately not as aware about the NES’s unique birth into the marketplace. It is very important to remember that the United States market was a cold market by virtue of the Atari Crash. The Japanese market was a cold market by a similar but different nature: it was unexplored.
Nintendo made the Wii in the Japanese context (creating new market) where they should have been looking at it in the American context (reviving a dead market). The reason why is because reviving the dead market will be the mission of future Nintendo game consoles.
Though not entirely reliable, we also have a filing with the U.S. copyright office: according to this filing, the game (or specifically, the packaging for the game) has a date of publication of October 19, just one day past Nintendo’s official internal date. Of course, copyright dates are all over the place — if you believe the filings, the game itself came out September 14 and the instruction manual came out October 31. I was also recently informed by Library of Congress researcher David Gibson that publication dates are often off by exactly one day in these filings, which could explain a discrepency.
This article is horrible. All you have to do is find the legal fingerprints. Products such as video games must be copyrighted and there is a legal trail. While some are blowing this up to be ‘real video game journalism’, anyone would have immediately gone to the legal records.
The more interesting question is not when Super Mario Brothers was released but when did Americans first play it? It was during focus group tests that Nintendo of America was doing to determine the market potential of the Japanese Nintendo games. The reaction of the focus groups was negative. When people played Super Mario Brothers, they said, “It sucked!” Arakawa gave up and abandoned the NES project due to those test results. Yamauchi, however, convinced him to try a test market. And not just any test market but the one hardest hit by the video game crash. The hardest hit was New York.
And this is why New York was the original test market for the Nintendo Entertainment System… and Super Mario Brothers.
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