This Week in Retro: Dr. Mario [1990]

July 27, 1990: Nintendo Invents The Only Good DRM

by Diamond Feit

Does Mario make games better? Nintendo's original mascot hero was envisioned as an everyman, a character who could be anyone and do anything. Today we consider him a "plumber" entirely because of a couple game appearances which involved pipes, but in the 1980s, Mario had all sorts of jobs and played all the sports—when he wasn't the referee.

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto once told The Daily News, "Mario is a universal language... We created Mario so the player would experience what Mario is experiencing. That connection is a universal feeling." In other words, Mario didn't rescue Lady from Donkey Kong, you did, when you put a quarter into the machine or inserted the cartridge into your NES. Mario didn't smash up that construction site in Wrecking Crew, you did, when you decided you'd played enough Super Mario Bros. and wanted to try a different game. And 30 years ago this week, Mario did not wage war on microscopic viruses, you did, when you played Dr. Mario on NES or Game Boy.

Or at the very least, I did.

It cannot be overstated how large an impact Tetris had when it launched on Game Boy in 1989. For those unaware, Tetris was not invented by Nintendo, nor was the Game Boy version the first incarnation to be commercially released (I have clear memories of playing it on a Macintosh at school in 1988). However, when Nintendo debuted a portable version of the puzzler for their brand-new handheld console, the reaction was electric. Not only were kids everywhere excited, but so were adults. I would hear stories from my parents' friends about playing it for hours, or even that their parents were hooked on the Soviet sensation. Considering my parents' casual disdain for video games at the time, discovering that adults of all ages were playing Tetris was revelatory, and a sign that maybe it would be okay if I never outgrew my love for games (so far, so good).

The Tetris boom led to a flurry of puzzle games being developed for Nintendo's Game Boy, a fact of life that Jeremy Parish can attest to based on the sheer number of such software titles appearing in his Game Boy Works video series. Naturally, Nintendo had zero qualms about throwing their own hat into the ring, and why wouldn't they lead with their best foot forward? By 1990, Mario was a legitimate worldwide icon; there's no reason he couldn't (or shouldn't) be shoehorned into a puzzle game.

Considering its legacy as one of the greatest video games ever made, most versions of Tetris (Nintendo's included) did not have much personality. There's fun music, there are cute animations if you play very, very well, but you see no characters during gameplay and have no sense of what the player is accomplishing by playing. It's a big reason why silly memes about the game make us laugh: Tetris has no dialogue or narrative, so why not make up nicknames for the pieces (which would eventually make their way into an answer on Jeopardy, BTW)?

In this one specific aspect, Dr. Mario trounces Tetris. Not only is Mario on screen at all times wearing a lab coat, a stethoscope, and a head mirror, he's shown to be the one throwing the "vitamins" into the bottle which the player can then rotate and position in order to eliminate the three unique virus characters. The giant pills could just as easily fall into view from the top of the screen, Tetris-style, but by showing Mario dispensing the medicine himself, a deeper, unspoken connection is made with the player: it's not really about Dr. Mario, it's about Dr. Me.

Whoever is actually playing the game, the goal is straightforward: Align the pills as they fall to create four-in-a-row matches either vertically or horizontally. (Sadly, diagonals do not count like they do in Klax or Columns.) Each pill is made of two halves which each count as one block, just as viruses count as one block apiece. With only three colors in the game, pills only come in six varieties and are uniform in size. This keeps things simpler than Tetris, which had seven different pieces; the wrong tetromino at the wrong time was worse than useless, as it could jam up a carefully staged situation. That's less of an issue in Dr. Mario as the right two pills can erase each other from existence, making the prospect of getting out of scrapes potentially less worrisome.

It's also impressive that Nintendo went for a double-console launch of Dr. Mario, a move that used to carry more meaning before the company's home and handheld consoles essentially fused together. The Game Boy was barely a year old at the time, while the NES was still red-hot in the U.S., so giving players a choice of format made a lot of sense. Dr. Mario feels better suited to the handheld arena, even if the lack of colors does make the viruses a bit less cute. Thankfully, with only three "colors" to worry about, the transition to grayscale is an easy one.

My favorite thing about Dr. Mario isn't Mario or the viruses or the excellent music (like Tetris, the game is fueled by Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka's tunes, although this time around he's not working with pre-existing songs). No, what I love is its inversion of the Tetris approach to puzzle-solving. Each level in Dr. Mario begins with a number of viruses scattered around the screen which must all be destroyed in order to proceed. The longer a game of Dr. Mario lasts, the more challenging the virus layout gets, but eventually there is a "clear" status which results in an animated ending. Tetris, on the other hand, is an endless battle against chaos that the players themselves create: the playfield is empty before the blocks appear and the game only ends when no more blocks can enter. There is no real victory to be found in Tetris; as in Global Thermonuclear War, "the only winning move is not to play."

Three decades later, Dr. Mario's legacy remains strong. While I may be the only human being who enjoys it more than Tetris, the game moved millions of copies on both platforms and both the character and puzzle game have been brought back time and again. Dr. Mario and Tetris were sold together on a single Super Nintendo cartridge (Tetris got top billing); the character Dr. Mario has appeared as a variant of Mario in multiple versions of Super Smash Bros.; and when Nintendo needed a puzzle game to fill out their mobile offerings, they created Dr. Mario World. Not bad for a plumber who never went to medical school. 

Seriously, read the manual. He's just working at a hospital with no degree whatsoever! He's working with contagions but he's not wearing a mask... and since when do "vitamins" kill viruses?? He should just use a Fire Flower and burn the whole bottle. And why is Peach the "nurse," she's royalty!? [trails off....]