Nintendo
NES’ Super Mario Bros. enemies have been tricking us like this for forty years
The hitboxes of NES’ Super Mario Bros. enemies are much smaller than their size would suggest, which would have resulted in countless Mario deaths.
Super Mario Bros. for NES is not only one of the best video games of all time, but also one of the most influential, and the one that put Shigeru Miyamoto on the map. It is a title that has given rise to a thousand and one anecdotes, and today we are going to tell you about the peculiar way in which its enemies have been deceiving us since 1985, the year of its release. A hint: it has to do with their size and the damage they inflict on Mario.
The hitboxes of enemies in Super Mario Bros. are not as accurate as they appear to be
It turns out that the hitboxes of enemies in Super Mario Bros. are quite a bit smaller than the size of their sprites. That is, the part of the enemy that causes damage to Mario when he comes into contact with it is much smaller than the apparent size of each enemy itself. This has undoubtedly resulted in countless Mario deaths since the original release of the video game. All because he was trying to avoid an enemy - or part of an enemy - that would have done no harm had it touched him.
As reported by the Twitter/X account @MarioBrothBlog, which specializes in franchise curiosities and anecdotes, we can see how Mario comes into contact with a Piranha Plant while jumping over it, but does not take damage because it does not touch its hitbox, which is what the game code considers to be the enemy’s damage zone.
The most blatant example of this is the flame that Bowser spits, which has a hitbox about the size of the fireballs Mario throws after picking up the flower, even though it looks like an elongated flame. As we said, this is a curiosity of this video game that is not usually explored, and we are sure that it has caused many deaths among players trying to avoid apparent dangers that are not that serious.
Continuing with this theme, a reader of the @MarioBrothBlog account created a ROMhack of Super Mario Bros. changing the size of the enemies to match their respective hitboxes, and in this video clip, we can see how effectively each of these dangers that Mario dodges are smaller than in the original game. This is a kind of “honest version” of Super Mario Bros.
One of the reasons for this peculiar way of programming the game’s enemies could be the relative inexperience of the developers with the NES, since it was the first video game created by Nintendo R&D4. In any case, Super Mario Bros. was a resounding success, becoming the best-selling NES title with 40 million units sold, and if we count its re-releases such as Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Game Boy Color, 1999) or NES Classics: Super Mario Bros. (Game Boy Advance, 2004), we are talking about 58 million units sold. His legacy lives on to this day, where the Super Mario franchise is more alive than ever with recent releases such as Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023).