Super Mario Bros.
Mario has become one of the biggest faces in the gaming industry since the debut of his popular title, Super Mario Bros. His first game was a fairly simple one that mainly involved jumping across platforms and throwing fireballs at enemies. While the franchise has come to be known as family friendly, there was actually a time when Nintendo contemplated on giving Mario a gun.
The early control scheme for Super Mario Bros was A to shoot bullets, B to dash, and up on the control pad to jump. They even wanted to include a shoot ‘em up stage where Mario jumps on clouds and pelts enemies with a barrage of bullets. Later in development, Nintendo scrapped the bullets for fireballs since they wanted to emphasize on all the jumping action.
Incidentally, the idea about including mushrooms linked with the game’s setting in a magical kingdom as people in folk tales would usually wander into forests and eat mushrooms, hence how they ended up with the iconic Mushroom Kingdom name.
It’s a bit mind boggling to think about how the Mario series would have turned out if they kept the gun idea. For all we know, it could have become something similar to Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle.
