The game was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka as 'a grand culmination' of the Famicom team's three years of game mechanics and programming, drawing from their experiences working on Devil World and the side-scrollers Excitebike and Kung Fu to advance their previous work on platforming ' athletic games' such as Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. They must traverse side-scrolling stages while avoiding hazards such as enemies and pits with the aid of power-ups such as the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower and Starman. Players control Mario, or his brother Luigi in the multiplayer mode, as they travel the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser (King Koopa). System received a wide international release for overseas markets outside of Japan in early 1986, before the NES version received a wide release in North America the same year and in PAL regions in 1987.
Following a limited US release for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in late 1985, the Vs. and the first in the Super Mario series, it was released in 1985 for the Famicom in Japan. The successor to the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros. is a platform game developed and published by Nintendo.
