Super Mario Bros is a side-scrolling platform game directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka for Nintendo’s in-house R&D4 team, released for the Famicom in Japan in September 1985 and for the NES in North America shortly after. Miyamoto had joined Nintendo as an artist and toy designer and originally pitched a game built around licensed Popeye characters before pivoting to an original plumber hero once those rights fell through, with programming by Toshihiko Nakago and Kazuaki Morita and a soundtrack by Koji Kondo that remains one of the most recognizable in gaming. Players guide Mario, and in two-player mode his brother Luigi, through the Mushroom Kingdom’s side-scrolling worlds, stomping enemies, collecting coins and power-ups, and racing toward each stage’s flagpole to rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser. Its tight, physics-driven controls and level design became the template the platforming genre would follow for decades, and its runaway commercial success is widely credited with helping pull the North American games industry out of the 1983 crash and cementing the NES as a mainstream success.