Searching for the ultimate Super Mario Bros. player among the masses

Video directed by Joe Pickard and edited by Scott Pearson. Click here for transcript.

If you're a geek of, shall we say, a certain age, odds are you've experienced the first-hand joy of plopping yourself down cross-legged on the carpet in front of a blurry television-set to channel 3 or channel 4, of course-and whiling away an entire day playing the original Super Mario Bros. on the NES. (You also know for a fact that all deaths are the stupid controller's fault.)

Indeed, Super Mario Bros. is probably one of the pop-culture pillars of the GenX/Millennial collective unconscious (and maybe for GenZ, too, though going by common cohort dates, the GenZ folks were more likely to have grown up with much more advanced consoles than the poor old Nintendo Entertainment System). But how pervasive is it, really? How universal is the experience of settling in to play SMB in its original NES format, without emulators on an actual CRT television, and having those levels (and that music!) tattooed directly onto your brain?

To try to find out, we grabbed 30 randos from the New York area (back in January, in the Long-Long-Ago when people still walked the streets freely) and challenged them to slip on their plumbers' overalls and see how long they could survive on a journey through World 1-1 of the Mushroom Kingdom. We also brought in SMB speedrunners Authorblues and Kosmic to break down the iconic level design of World 1-1 and to walk us through some of the esoteric tricks speedrunners use to blast through the level as fast as humanly possible.

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