When was Super Mario Bros. released?

At Gamasutra, Frank Cifaldi tries to pin down a fact that’s suprisingly slippery: when was Super Mario Bros. released in the U.S.? The official date—October 19, 1985—is somewhat unconvincing. The console industry crash turned the era into a crater of press inattention and poor record-keeping, showing that even in the computer age, the hard facts of mass culture can slip weirdly into the memory hole.

Assuming as we are that Super Mario Bros. was available for sale on the same day as the NES, all of this research is pointing to that first sale being on October 19, but without any real paper evidence to prove it, I’m just not satisfied.

I got in contact with FAO Schwarz … [which] acknowledged that the store was indeed the site of the first NES sale: or at least, that’s what they’re saying as part of the 150th anniversary celebration. They don’t seem to have any actual record of this, nor do they have any sales data going back that far to verify the date. The claim seems to have come directly from Nintendo.

My favorite part are the arguments over whether there was a Super Mario Bros. arcade game in 1984 or not. Anyone who remembers the 19A0s will know exactly why we can’t quite pin down this stuff.

Voxel Mario by *cezkid