Overwhelmed with excitement I screamed at my Dad to set up the system as quickly as he possibly could. I jumped up and down as he scrambled to plug the cables in their respective ports. I powered up the system, and the fun began.

My parents were in the other room when I first began to play. This was my first side-scrolling platform game, and I amazed myself when I managed to get Mario up onto one of the brown bricks on the first screen. I ran out of the room in excitement, beckoning for my mother to come see my latest accomplishment. "That's nice honey."

Super Mario Bros . was bundled with the Nintendo Entertainment System during its debut in 1985. The trend of packaging a game with the core system would end years later, but this is where it all began. Credited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best selling video game of all time, Super Mario Bros . was Nintendo's first Killer App, and a game that helped move a bounty of NES consoles.

The game really needs no significant introduction. By 2007, the plump plumber Mario is Nintendo's most easily recognizable mascot, perhaps almost as identifiable as Colonel Sanders, the Microsoft logo, or Mickey Mouse. The princess has been kidnapped by the evil Bowser. Mario and his brother Luigi must set forth to rescue her. The controls were simple: A to jump, hold B to run. There were two available powerups: a mushroom which made Mario taller and stronger, thus allowing him to take a second hit before losing a life, and a fire flower which gave him the ability to shoot flaming balls at Koopa Troopas, Goombas, and those pesky sharp-toothed flowers that climbed out of the giant green pipes.

The game was the first smooth-scrolling platform game, as each screen need not be individually loaded; the entire level was one smooth experience.

Players negotiate 8 challenging worlds, stomping on enemies as they pass through, and battling Bowser at the end of each. It was so frustrating on my first run through the game when that silly little Princess never seemed to be able to stay put in one place. She was always one step ahead…

Reaching the end of each level is a pleasurable experience, as the controls are extremely tight and rarely let the player down. In the second stage it is imperative to be absolutely pixel-perfect in jumping from one narrow ledge to another - and with the proper skill, this is easily accomplished. While there may be several times where Mario ends up in a bottomless pit, for the most part, the controls do as they're told and are dead-on.

Super Mario Bros. is over two decades old. It has been frequently imitated, but never truly duplicated. The next revolutionary step would only come in 1997 with the release of Super Mario 64, and the emergence of a fully realized 3D world. Until then, this game set the pace for the industry, and all that any developer could do was follow, and hope to be almost as good.

The graphics are unavoidably outdated, as over the course of 22 years graphics have undergone tremendous improvements. Yet at the time, it was beautiful. The colors were bright and crisp, there was never any slowdown, and the animations were quirky and inspired. The sound effects are absolutely unforgettable, from the stomping on Goombas' heads to the sweet tune of coins being pumped out of bricks. And how can we forget one of the game's greatest legacies - the Super Mario theme? The game immersed the player more than ever before, and really demonstrated what games are supposed to be; original, and fun.