Judging compared to old Mario is a little pointless as they seem to be separated not just by 25 years but also the entire approach, plus old Mario was just another plat-former that gained its popularity from being the best on a well selling system, it not really anything special and never was.
I don't know, being the best at something is pretty special imo
The Best on one system not the best overall.
By old Mario, you mean Super Mario Brothers? Oh, it was revolutionary AND special. I think due to its age you're forgetting how early in platformer history, especially of the side-scrolling variation, it actually came out. It had a rudimentary story behind it, which kinda started with Donkey Kong, power ups, smooth scrolling, differently themed worlds, epic fusion of gameplay and music, secrets, boss battles, precise movement control - we take some of this stuff for granted these days and don't see it anymore. Yes, there were platformers before and some of them had ELEMENTS Mario brought together but SMB was the game that truly introduced "new generation" platformers that have remained unchanged at their core ever since.
It's just like with RTSes - there were some games having elements of the modern RTS before Dune 2 but it was THAT game that defined the genre as we know it today.
Fine but the year before and equally successful at the time was Pac-Land, containing pretty much all the same elements that Mario did, minus parallax scrolling its largely forgotten by most people now but still no Pac-Land no Mario, but this is the same as asking a lot of people what the first modern RTS is and they wont answer Dune2 They're such more likely to answer Command and Conquer or even Red Alert.
The reason for Mario's ultimate success is simple; as a genuinely good platformer (though derivative) at its time of release was the only real platformer available on the NES and as its dev cost had been beyond that of the third party studios therefore it was the only good platformer available for around 8 months. Mario is simply Wii Sports 25 years ago. A good game and will define a gaming experience for a generation but is simply not that original, ground breaking or worthy of the praise it gets. Its a nostalgic reaction for most people, for those people Mario was the first or an early gaming experience; as one of the best titles for a system that struggled to get great third party releases for a year or so, along with Excitebike and Duck Hunt it formed the vast majority of games played on the system for a year, it stood out and I'm not arguing the game wasn't good, just that in the history of gaming it isn't the gold mark that its made out to be.
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I take it all back. FFFFFFUUUUUU cardboard!!!!!
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