Super Mario Bros.

Mario's jump responds to button hold, run speed and mid-air steering. In Super Mario Bros. jump height depends on how long you hold the button, distance depends on running speed, and you can steer in mid air. Donkey Kong had given Mario only three preprogrammed jumps.

That push and pull between physics and input made leaping expressive and challenging enough to carry a whole game, and helped the platform genre explode. Mark Brown: "the simple act of leaping around is made incredibly fun."

Tiny teams kept bets cheap enough to try unproven ideas. Super Mario Bros. has 7 people in its credits, compared with 10 for Wolfenstein 3D and 1 for Pong. Small, cheap teams let early makers take chances without proof of demand.

As budgets grew to teams of 100 plus and tens of millions of dollars, publishers became risk averse and new genres stopped appearing in the 2000s. "It was a little less risky, so we could take a chance with games."

Mario's jump responds to button hold, run speed and mid-air steering. In Super Mario Bros. jump height depends on how long you hold the button, distance depends on running speed, and you can steer in mid air. Donkey Kong had given Mario only three preprogrammed jumps.

That push and pull between physics and input made leaping expressive and challenging enough to carry a whole game, and helped the platform genre explode. Mark Brown: "the simple act of leaping around is made incredibly fun."

Variable jump height comes from cutting the jump when the button is released. Variable jump height, in games since Super Mario Bros., lets players choose between a short hop and a big leap, giving fine control over where they land.

Recreating it for his own game, Mark Brown checks whether the player has let go of jump while rising and immediately applies heavy downward gravity: "I just check if the player has let go of the jump button and throw on that heavy downward gravity."

Nintendo starts from a fun action, not a character or story. Mario began as Jumpman, a character defined by his leap. Nintendo treats what the player does and how they do it as the catalyst for everything else, from character design to the soundtrack's genre.

Gunpei Yokoi's method: "I first take the character which you're going to control and replace them with a dot as a placeholder, then I think about what kind of movement would be fun."

Every object in the game asks the player to jump. Bricks, power-up blocks, pipes, platforms and even the fire flower's 45 degree shot all call for a jump. The flagpole sits one brick off the ground so you have to jump to finish a level.

Miyamoto cut a planned shoot 'em up stage to protect that focus: "we wanted to focus on jumping action."

Stomping enemies came from asking what jumping logically leads to. Miyamoto asked "what is the logical way to defeat an enemy in a game about jumping?" and made jumping on enemies the way to kill them.

No platformer had done it before Mario; Sonic and Aladdin copied it later.