Have You Played Super Mario Bros. Wrong All My Life
Original Super Mario Bros. is a betting game . You don’t have the luxury of saving states or level passwords. Once you lose all your lives, the game is over. If you want to play again, you need to start from scratch – in World 1-1, regardless of whether you lost your third life on the first level, or in World 8-4. Or so we thought.
Millions have played Super Mario Bros. according to these rules, and millions suffered humiliation and defeat. Going through 32 levels of the Bowser-infested Mushroom Kingdom, only to lose to the beast itself in the final moments of the game, is punishment enough. Being subjected to a comeback in “World 1-1” accompanied by this hilarious theme song ? Torture.
But it turns out that there was never any reason to replay the entire game every time you lost. From 1985 to the present, you can restart the world you died in no matter how many game windows you get. No Game Genie required.
(I’ll give you some time to get yourself together.)
While this secret of Super Mario Bros. been surfing the internet for years, RetroGamingOnline made it viral on TikTok with a recent video . With 2.1 million views and 108,000 likes and still growing, it has awakened another group of gamers to this hidden secret of the NES era.
This trick works with any version of the original Super Mario Bros., whether it’s on OG NES, Virtual Console on Wii U, or Nintendo Switch Online, so you can try it out for yourself. The next time you lose all your lives, let the game go back to the title screen. Hold down button A, then press Start. The game will then restart from the first level of the last world you died in, not from 1-1.
This means that if you died in World 4-1, you will see 4-1. If you lost in the World 7-3, you start with 7-1. So you still have to go through all the levels of the world that you have already completed, but it’s definitely better than starting over.