Super Mario Bros

I'm ashamed to admit this in public, but I don't recall having ever beat the original Super Mario Bros back on the NES when I was a kid (without using some sort of cheats), despite having played it for hundreds of hours on end. World 8 was just too difficult.

Today I downloaded the Wii "Virtual Console" version, played it through and beat it on the first try, and only died once (on the last boss).

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. I have not played the game in more than 15 years, so seemingly the ability to beat the game is unrelated to having played it recently (though I did eerily remember the locations of every single powerup and warp point as if it was just yesterday).

I suspect that I must have much better hand-eye coordination and timing now than I did when I was 5 years old, because it seemed much easier to control Mario this time around, especially through all of the tricky jumps which were so difficult back in the day. The strange thing is that I don't remember having felt like I had "bad" coordination back then, but I must have. I guess 15 years of playing video games is useful for something 🙂