The Mystery of the Super Mario Bros. U.S. Release Date

I remember seeing Super Mario Bros. vs in the arcade before I played the NES version.

nintendolife.com says this:

13th Sep 1985 (JPN)
17th Nov 1985 (USA)
15th May 1987 (UK/EU)

not a reliable source if you ask me

Yes it was October 13, 1985, it says so in Super Mario All-Stars.

I mean 18th

@#3: The mystery has been solved!...do you really think, nobody of those guys doing the research has ever checked Mario All-Stars? It's more complicated than that.

why is it such a big deal when the game came out?

I remember it well. I pre-ordered it. It came with a keychain, and a rubber ball shaped like Mario.

I'm not telling you the date though. It comes to my grave!!

I always wondered why I've seen different release dates over the years for SMB. Interesting read.

I don't know when the NES came out in the Dallas area, but I could swear SMB wasn't one of the original titles on the shelves. I remember Kung Fu and Hogan's Alley, but my memory is being excited later on when SMB showed up on the shelves after I'd already had the NES a little while. But, that's 27 years ago, so I could be wrong.

Some of you guys that remember the 80's-Was it generally a nationwide standard release date in the 80s? Maybe it wasn't standard which could lead to the controversy.

@Ras Really what was the nes launch tite?

Also would Nintendo say?

I remember playing this in a grocery store in 1986 and got it that year with my very first NES home console for Christmas... so I would say 1986, I always assumed though it was released in 1985 like the game intro screen says.

@Chicken_Brutus Admit it! You forgot!!

There's absolutely no way it could have been released on Nov. 17th 1985, because that was a Sunday. It had to have been released sometime in October 1985, because it was one of the 4 games I got along with the NES as a present for my 6th birthday the day before Halloween that year. I've tried to change the info on Wikipedia a couple times before but it keeps getting changed back to the incorrect date!!!

I'm sure Nintendo would like to claim it was there on launch, but I don't believe that was the case based on real live memories of 1985.

I don't really have any evidence just personal experience my dad bought me a copy of smb in october of 1985 so it had to come out at that time or before that time.

The European release date doesn't seem definitive either. The listed release date of SMB for Europe in many places (including this site) is 15th May 1987 but I've heard reports of its original EU release date being sometime in 1986.

Well we know the game was released in '85 but both october 13th and the 18th fit the mario scheudule. If you look at every major Mario release they fall mainly around friday and saturday with a few out of place. But looking at the games maybe the 13th is alot more believable since alot of Mario games seem to come out on Sunday in NA

Ok ok... But why wouldn't Nintendo keep a record? It's just weird...
And @keeperbvk you can stop being so sarcastic.

It came out as a launch game along with the not yet dubbed but was to be called 'Deluxe Set.' My mom happened to buy us the test launch system out of California that year for Christmas and hit it away along with SMB and Hogan's Alley so we had 4 games on Christmas day to play with.

It's not an important fact. It's obscure and frankly, it doesn't seem like something we should lose any time or sleep over. It's a good game, that's all that matters to me.

I got my NES system on Christmas 1985 when my mother got a friend of hers that lives in Santa Monica to pick one up for her and I was sitting at my TV playing Super Mario Bros. that morning. So we do know it was released during the early release in NY and LA. Now as to the exact date, that I don't know.

Sorry, but I was too busy learning how to walk and talk to pay attention to video games back then.

hey people,Off topicly, i have a quick question, what do you think Mario would drink first Pepsi, or coke?

@26
neither he only eats musrooms/flowers

oh yeah, and peach's cake

Coke. It's red just like Mario.

Anybody keep their receipt?

Isn't this the case with a lot of NES games? Virtual Console and Super Smash Bros. Brawl lists some games only by their month of release.

I was dead back then so i dont know sqat.(not born yet)

Thomas, thanks for the link to my article on TMK — but I think there's a small typo in the URL you're giving. Could you fix that?

http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb_release.shtml

Frank Cifaldi got several new sources, but sadly he ran into the same dead end I did... it's quite possible to get a vague idea of when the game was released, but no one has been able to provide the "smoking gun" to prove exactly when it was first available.

Keep contacting NOA, Minoru Arakawa and checking store inventory records. The mystery will be solved someday. Personally, I believe Nintendo shipped the game to retailers on October 18th, 1985. When these stores acutally sold the product is a big ?

@daviddayton Fixed the link now David

@repplyguy67 hey people,Off topicly, i have a quick question, what do you think Mario would drink first Pepsi, or coke?

Now this, I can answer. New Coke replaced Coca-Cola on April 23, 1985. Coca-Cola Classic replaced it on July 10, 1985. This was definitely before Super Mario Bros. was released, and according to Wikipedia: "By the end of the year, Coke Classic was substantially outselling both New Coke and Pepsi. Six months after the rollout, Coke's sales had increased at more than twice the rate of Pepsi's." So, I think Mario would have definitely grabbed for a Coke Classic after a long day of stomping goombas.

(Now, if we go back to when he was still Jumpman, he was more into Dr Pepper)

Does it really matter what date games came out on beyond buying them the first day? Hell I can't remember what I did last week beside going to school.

I had three years old in 1985, didn't play the game until I was 8 or 9. And I live in South America, which means I'm an even less reliable source. All I can say is that the first time I even heard of Mario was through the SMB3 saturday morning cartoon.

It's kinda like the video game equivalent to nobody remembering the date of the moon landing. (people remembered that because they knew it was going to be historic in the making. Nintendo probably didn't think SMB was going to be.)
Due to, well Nintendo revitalizing the game industry after the crash, and Super Mario Bros. was undoubtedly one of the games that got them to their position in the console market.

I'm just a few months older, than when the Nes was publicly available in the U.S. I have no ideas. I do know that thanks to modern technology, there is almost no excuse for well executed, timed, & planned/coordinated launch of any products.

I have a hard enough time trying to remember the exact year my sister, & I got our SNes,

Edit: For those this is really important to, just try to remember other things of 85/86 that can help sort of triangulate when the game was out, based on something, like say, a tv show existing, or not. Stuff like that.

In 1985... I... wasn't there at all...
Here's another gaming unknown for that guy...
Why is Mario's costume red, when red generally represents enemies and second-players in local multiplayer games?

@heebeegeebee: Nintendo historically released their games on Sundays. I think they finally changed this but I'm pretty sure MK Wii released on a Sunday.

@LittleBigVita
It's been well documented through interviews with Miyamoto that Mario's appearance was solely due to the limitations of the graphics at the time. He has a mustache because mouths were too hard to draw. He has a hat because his hair was too hard to animate. And the color of his clothes were bold colors that made the character easily recognizable and different from the backgrounds.

@Ras thanks for your answer, to my "mario" would drink coke, or pepsi, question. I generally came to the same
answer. I really appreciate, that you took some time to
Lookup some of thoes facts, and gave more meaning
to my small question, thank you.

@bonham2 @KingMike and to think the beloved, Mario, was very, close
to being "popeye the sailor" instead... yeah, you can even, look it up... ikr...?

Um, Mario is more popular, therefore he drinks Coke.
Luigi is an underdog, so he will naturally reach for the Pepsi.

Since the videogame industry was still in it's infancy at the time, I really don't believe that they had standard release dates back then. Retailers likely just started selling stuff as soon as they got their hands on them. Nintendo was probably rolling things out as quickly as possible, and usually, the East Coast and West coast get stuff first, then is slowly spreads throughout the middle parts of the US, first the large cities get it, then it goes everywhere else. Different geographic regions would have gotten the goods on different dates, so there may have been literally dozens of geographic launch dates.

With modern launches, they usually have entire warehouses full of product months ahead of schedule. A month before Wii's launch, I saw insider photos of huge warehouse pallets full of Wii boxes, waiting to be shipped. Those products usually make it to the retail stock rooms in back of the store about a week ahead of launch. Retailers have a contractual agreement to withhold sales of product until launch day. Eventually, this culminated into midnight launch parties, etc which are heavily publicized...

I just don't believe they had that exact type of infrastructure back in the 80s. Little emphasis was placed on launch dates back then. Preorders were unheard of, because the retailers themselves had no way of knowing when products would arrive.