What is… Dr. Mario? Could it be a game to stand the test of time? Is it one of the best games on the NES? And most important of all, does it deserve the Malstrom Award, the MOST prestigious award in all of gaming? Let’s find out.
Above: Dancing viruses! Amazing how much character that gives the game.
As famous as Dr. Mario is, especially as one of the only true successful rivals to Tetris, we know little about the development of the game. With Mario or Zelda, we get told and retold the stories. But with Dr. Mario, there is silence. The reason why is that it is a Gunpei Yokoi game. Nintendo marketing has no interest promoting a dead man who left the company.
I did find this video of Dr. Mario in development. It shows three versions. The first is a 1989 version. Second version is an evolved 1989 version where viruses are animated and the debris drops. The third version is retail.
I’m not sure what the genesis of the Dr. Mario idea came from, but it is clear the idea of clearing viruses came early on. Three different viruses. Match four in a horizontal or vertical direction to make them disappear. To win, eliminate the viruses.
It’s a simple concept. Yet, the video above shows how it took at least a year of playing to finetune the gameplay. It looks like the production crew was brought in at the end to put in the dancing viruses and slick menus.
The game does have two player versus which catapults Dr. Mario as one of the most intense multiplayer games on the NES or any system.
This game oozes ‘easy to learn’, ‘hard to master’.
Music
This game has a few tunes, but they’re rocking! Listen!
Underrated
Dr. Mario is grossly underrated among gamers and NES fanatics.
Folks, this game single-handedly got Grandma into video games. I don’t know what it is about this game, but it is catnip to women. Mothers would play it while their son was at school. Grandma would play nothing else. The game’s single player version is addictive.
But the multiplayer is practically a party game. Intense sibling rivalries would erupt through the multiplayer.
When you see ‘best of NES library lists’, you see the adventure games, the RPGs, some shmups, but you never see this one. Why not? During the Wii revolution, many gamers dismissed Wii and everything on it because it was ‘too casual’ meaning Grandma played it. You can’t like a game your parents liked.
But now the NES kids are parents themselves, and they can see the folly of that thinking.
Aside from being one of the best selling NES games, Dr. Mario was the most frequently played by certain people.
The game had excellent single player. The game had excellent multiplayer. The game had endless replayability. It rivaled Tetris. Come on!
The appeal of Dr. Mario crossed genders into non-gamers, but now we know it crosses into new generations. I saw my nephew, who was born during the Gamecube Era, become addicted to Dr. Mario on the NES Classic. It’s all he would play!
“Uncle Malstrom, I challenge you to Dr. Mario! I can beat all my friends easily!”
*He suffers face-melting defeat.*
“Whoa! I didn’t know anyone could play NES games like that!”
“I’m nothing compared to the housewives of the 1990s. THOSE are the TRUE CHAMPIONS OF DR. MARIO!!!!”
Other young people discovered Dr. Mario through Switch Online Service. “I can’t stop playing this game!!!” they say, surprised that such an ‘old game’ remains so captivating.
Any game that can do the above is vastly underrated today. Dr. Mario delivers a fantastic single player and multiplayer experience, both of which are endlessly replayable. Dr. Mario may be the best game on the entire damn system.
Malstrom Award
This game is literally perfect. It is god-tier in singleplayer, god-tier in multiplayer, endlessly replayable, easy learning curve, hard to master, women love it, and it never gets old. I love returning to it.
“But Malstrom,” you say. “Are there not better versions of the game that disqualifies it from the Malstrom Award, the most prestigious award in all of gaming?”
That’s the rub. How do you define ‘better’ version? Let me ask the reader a question.
“OK.”
Say you are playing Tetris on Gameboy.
“An incredible experience!”
Is that experience invalidated because every other version of Tetris, including during that time, was ‘superior’ because they had color?
“No.”
It doesn’t matter what new version is put out, Dr. Mario remains Dr. Mario. The game is largely the same.
Most of the versions that have come out are online only which means you cannot buy them today. So they’re invalid.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the Gameboy version is superior in any way.
The Super Nintendo Dr. Mario and Tetris was the same game except a match could flip to Tetris. Something felt off about that version though.
This leaves us with the N64 version of Dr. Mario with its story mode, four player modes, and so on.
Could the N64 version of Dr. Mario be argued to be the ‘best’ version of Dr. Mario? Maybe. But just because not every Bomberman is the Saturn version, it doesn’t invalidate the other versions. They’re all great.
So Dr. Mario gets a score of 10, the most prized Malstrom Award. It is a game you will keep coming back to again and again and again… unless you have a N64 with Dr. Mario and then you might go to that version. The original Dr. Mario has shown it is still one of the most entertaining games made despite being over thirty years old.
Dr. Mario is a perfect game.
Loose Price During Review:
Score: 10
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