Super Mario Bros.: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Super Mario Bros. is a side-scrolling platformer developed and published by Nintendo, released for the Family Computer in Japan in 1985 and worldwide on the NES. The player runs and jumps through side-scrolling stages, stomping enemies, gathering power-ups that change the hero's abilities, and racing to a goal at the end of each course, with fortress boss encounters along the way. As the game that crystallized and popularized the side-scrolling action platformer, it is one of the most influential video games ever made and the foundational origin of the run-jump-stomp-and-reach-the-goal platformer lineage. The 1985 game has no Steam release, so its origin is anchored to its Wikidata entry.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
The Strongest TOFU Buried gem
A tightly crafted, single-button precision platformer in which you play a living block of tofu, developed by Zounoashi Games (the doujin and indie circle of TomozovP and Masaki Meguro) and published by the Japanese indie label Phoenixx. Everything runs on one move: crouch, charge, and release to hurl yourself in any direction, tuning the height, angle, and mid-air control of a single jump with precision, and body-slamming into enemies to defeat them and into obstacles to break them. The catch is that tofu is fragile, and the game turns that fragility into its difficulty dial with three kinds you can choose: koya (freeze-dried) tofu is sturdy and plays with no time limit for beginners, momen (firm) tofu takes fall damage for intermediate players, and kinu (silken) tofu slides on slippery physics for experts. Each stage ends when you reach a bowl of miso soup, there are boss stages along the way, and power-ups reshape the run: atsuage (thick fried tofu) makes you huge and lets you smash through everything, while aburaage (thin fried tofu) boosts your jump. It leans hard on haptics, the feel of each charged leap, carries music by Ryo Nagamatsu, and folds in affectionate homage stages to Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, all as a deliberately compact one-to-two-hour experience with no padding. Released on October 2, 2024, Tofu Day in Japan, and the grand-prize winner of the first GYAAR Studio Indie Game Contest, with a Nintendo Switch version following in February 2025, it is Very Positive at 99 percent over 355 reviews (352 positive), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated assets and, by Steam's own content descriptors, nothing sexual. It already supports English alongside Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Korean, yet only 43 of its 355 reviews are in English (about 12.1 percent); every one of those English reviews is positive, but the Steam English-speaking world has only just begun to find it.