Super Mario Bros. 2: The Real Story
Super Mario Bros. 2 didn’t start as somebody else’s game with Mario pasted on top. It started as a Mario game, got turned into Doki Doki Panic, and then came back home to Mario.
You’ve heard the playground version a hundred times: “It’s not a real Mario game, it’s just Doki Doki Panic with new sprites.” That story skips the first chapter. Here’s the whole thing, from the start.
Chapter one: a Mario prototype that went up instead of right
In 1986, Nintendo’s team was already chasing the next idea after Super Mario Bros. Kensuke Tanabe, hired in April 1986, landed on a prototype that flipped the formula: instead of running to the right, you climbed up.
The demo, programmed by longtime Nintendo partner SRD, worked like this:
- Two players climbed together, vertically, toward the top of the level
- You could pick up blocks and stack them to reach higher
- You could grab your partner and throw them upward
- When you climbed about two thirds of the way up the screen, it jumped ahead and dropped you back near the bottom
Tanabe later admitted at GDC 2011 that the vertical scrolling trick alone wasn’t enough to make a fun game. The NES couldn’t scroll it smoothly, and playing solo felt flat.
Jon Irwin’s book on the game, which draws on Tanabe’s own account, describes the demo as an experiment with a new Super Mario Bros. game, with the goal placed at the top of the level like the original Donkey Kong. Miyamoto stopped the project, but gave Tanabe a direction: make it a little more Mario like. Add side scrolling. Keep the vertical parts in smaller doses.
That note changed everything. Tanabe said it himself: picking up blocks became pulling vegetables out of the ground.
One honest caveat for the record: nobody outside Nintendo has ever seen that demo, so we don’t know if the two little climbers were literally Mario and Luigi. What we do know is that the team behind Super Mario Bros. built it as a Mario style follow up, and every core mechanic of the game you played in 1988 came from it.
Chapter two: Fuji TV comes calling
While Tanabe was reworking the idea, Fuji Television struck a deal with Nintendo for a game to promote its Yume Kōjō ’87 event, a big media and technology expo whose name means Dream Factory. Tanabe remembered being called over to Fuji TV, handed a sheet of characters, and told to make a game with them.
So the Mario style prototype got new stars: the expo’s mascots. An Arabian themed family with Imajin, his girlfriend Lina, and his parents Mama and Papa. The story put them inside a storybook called the Dream World of Muu, where a villain named Mamu had kidnapped Imajin’s little siblings, the twins Piki and Poki.
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic came out on the Famicom Disk System in Japan on July 10, 1987, with Shigeru Miyamoto as producer. It became one of the biggest hits on the Disk System.
Now look at what was already inside it before anyone at Nintendo of America touched it:
- POW blocks, straight out of Mario Bros.
- Starmen with eyes that make you invincible
- Warp zones, entered through a special vase instead of a pipe
- The same team, the same producer, and a jump that sounds a whole lot like Mario’s
That’s not a random game that happened to get a Mario makeover. That’s a Mario prototype wearing a Fuji TV costume.
Chapter three: the sequel America never got
Meanwhile, Japan already had a Super Mario Bros. 2. It came out on the Famicom Disk System on June 3, 1986, built on the same engine as the original, and it was brutal. Nintendo has called it Takashi Tezuka’s directorial debut. Miyamoto’s attention that year was largely on The Legend of Zelda.
Howard Phillips, Nintendo of America’s resident game expert and later the face of Nintendo Power, got a copy in the summer of 1986. In his own telling, he died to a poison mushroom almost immediately. Then a gust of wind blew him into a pit. Then a Piranha Plant came out of a pipe he was already standing on, something that was always safe in the first game. Over and over, the game asked for a leap of faith and killed him for taking it.
Phillips’ problem wasn’t that it was hard. Plenty of NES games were hard. His problem was that it stopped being fun. He took his concerns to NOA president Minoru Arakawa. NOA also felt it looked too much like the first game at a time when the American NES market was still young and fragile.
That left Nintendo of America with no Mario sequel, a hit to follow up, and kids waiting.
Fun side note: years later, Nintendo Power’s Gail Tilden pitched giving the Japanese game away to Nintendo Power subscribers under the name The Lost Levels. Nintendo passed, worried it would confuse the market. The name stuck anyway, and the game finally reached America in 1993 on Super Mario All-Stars.
Chapter four: bringing it back home to Mario
The fix was sitting right there. Doki Doki Panic was a Disk System game, and America didn’t have the Disk System, so any Western release meant moving it to a cartridge anyway. Tanabe said that gave the team the chance to change more than just the format. In his words, the Fuji TV characters wouldn’t sell in America, but the Mario characters would.
So the original team went back in. Here’s who became who:
Doki Doki Panic | Super Mario Bros. 2 | What they do |
|---|---|---|
Imajin | Mario | The all rounder |
Mama | Luigi | Highest jumper |
Papa | Toad | Fastest digger and strongest lifter, worst jumper |
Lina | Princess Toadstool | The float jump |
Mamu | Wart | The final boss |
Piki and Poki | The Subcons | The ones you’re saving |
And it was a lot more than a sprite swap. The team added things that made it play like a Mario game:
- Running. Holding B to run didn’t exist in Doki Doki Panic. It was added because it was such a big part of Super Mario Bros.
- Shrinking. Mario and friends now shrink when they’re down to their last hit, just like the first game.
- Mushrooms. The heart health pickups became mushrooms, and the magic lamp became a potion.
- Luigi’s flutter. Luigi got that famous leg kicking jump animation to sell his high jump. It’s still part of his character today.
- The star theme. Grabbing a star now plays a new take on the classic Mario invincibility music.
- One run, not four. Doki Doki Panic made you beat the whole game with all four characters to see the ending. Super Mario Bros. 2 only asks once.
- A tougher Wart. He takes six hits instead of four.
- A dream instead of a storybook. The chapter pages became worlds, and the whole adventure became Mario’s dream.
There are also a pile of smaller touches: more animation frames for POW blocks, Albatoss, bomb fuses and vegetables, slower waterfalls, and a new boss in World 5. A 1988 game that got this much hands on work from Mario’s own team isn’t a reskin. It’s a Mario game finishing the trip it started in 1986.
Chapter five: October 1988 and the Christmas nobody could find it
Super Mario Bros. 2 hit American stores on October 9, 1988. Some sources just say October 1988, but that’s the date most commonly cited.
Nintendo Power built the hype first. The very first issue of Nintendo Power, dated July/August 1988, put Super Mario Bros. 2 on the cover: that unforgettable clay Mario facing down a clay Wart. Inside was a giant preview of the game. Nintendo mailed that first issue free to more than 3.2 million homes, the biggest circulation the magazine ever had. Months before the game was on shelves, millions of kids already knew about Shy Guys, vegetables, and a giant frog king.
Then nobody could find it. By the 1988 holidays, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Zelda II were the two games every kid wanted, and both were brutally hard to track down. ABC’s 20/20 ran a segment called “Nuts for Nintendo” about parents hunting from toy store to toy store. One shopper said he’d been hitting seven stores a day for three weeks with no luck. Another had traveled about 1,000 miles looking for a copy.
Parents suspected Nintendo was holding games back on purpose. Nintendo blamed a worldwide shortage of the memory chips that went into cartridges. NOA vice president Peter Main told 20/20 that demand blew past even their most optimistic projections and the chip suppliers simply couldn’t keep up. If you remember checking the shelf at Toys R Us, Kay Bee, or Kmart every weekend and walking out empty handed, that’s why.
And when it landed, it stayed on top. Super Mario Bros. 2 was the best selling video game in the United States for 14 straight months, from October 1988 to November 1989. It sold 3.5 million copies in the US by early 1990 and about 7.46 million worldwide. That makes it the best selling NES game that never came packed in with a console.
For a lot of us, it was also a first: the first time you could play as Princess Toadstool, the first time Toad was playable, and the first time Luigi looked and played like his own person instead of a green Mario.
Chapter six: Japan wanted it back
Here’s the part the “not a real Mario game” crowd never mentions. The game was such a hit, and changed so much from Doki Doki Panic, that Nintendo brought it home to Japan. It launched on the Famicom on September 14, 1992 as Super Mario USA.
Since then it has never really left:
Year | Release |
|---|---|
2023 | Nintendo Switch Online, as part of Nintendo Classics |
2014 | Wii U Virtual Console (Super Mario Advance) |
2007 | Wii Virtual Console |
2001 | Super Mario Advance, a Game Boy Advance launch title |
1996 | BS Super Mario USA Power Challenge, a Satellaview broadcast in Japan |
1993 | Super Mario All-Stars on the Super NES |
1992 | Super Mario USA on the Famicom |
And look at how much of the Mario universe comes from this one game:
- Enemies that became regulars: Shy Guy, Birdo, Bob-omb, Pokey, Ninji, Snifit, and Phanto
- Peach’s float jump, which she still uses today
- Luigi’s tall frame and flutter jump, the first time Mario and Luigi had noticeably different heights. Miyamoto himself came up with that leg flutter
- Lifting and throwing, the mechanic straight out of that 1986 prototype, now a Mario staple
- Super Mario 3D World, which brought back the same four heroes with the same basic abilities
It’s still showing up in 2026. Birdo is playable in Mario Kart World. Phanto is back in the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. And Wart finally made the big screen in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, voiced by Luis Guzmán, alongside Birdo, Mouser, and Clawgrip.
Fun facts for your next argument
- Nintendo had done this before. Gail Tilden recalled that Arakawa’s request to turn Doki Doki Panic into a Mario game seemed odd at first, but Nintendo already had a history of it: Donkey Kong grew out of a canceled Popeye project.
- Mario’s composer scored it. The Doki Doki Panic soundtrack was by Koji Kondo, the same composer behind Super Mario Bros.
- Nintendo Power rated it higher than its siblings in one guide. In the Pak Source issue, SMB2 earned a perfect 5 in Challenge and Theme Fun. Neither Super Mario Bros. nor Super Mario Bros. 3 got a 5 in any category.
- Japan reviewers weren’t sold in 1992. Famitsu’s critics felt Super Mario USA was dated and wished Nintendo had turned the enemies into Mario characters too.
- Even Howard Phillips has a confession. The man who rejected the Japanese sequel has admitted that the American version doesn’t quite have the feel of a true Mario game. Fair. It plays differently. But “different” and “not real” aren’t the same thing.
The bottom line
Super Mario Bros. 2 began as a Mario style prototype from Mario’s own team. It spent a year wearing Fuji TV’s costume as Doki Doki Panic. Then the same team brought it home, rebuilt it around Mario, and sent it out to become a 14 month sales champion, a Japanese release of its own, and the source of half the cast you still see in Mario games today.
That’s not a fake Mario game. That’s the long way home.
What was your Super Mario Bros. 2 main: Mario, Luigi, Toad, or the Princess? Tell us in the comments.
Sources
- The Secret History of Super Mario Bros. 2, Wired (Chris Kohler, 2011)
- The unsuccessful prototype that became Super Mario Bros. 2, Engadget
- There’s Super Mario DNA in Doki Doki Panic, Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games (quotes Jon Irwin’s Boss Fight Books history and Howard Phillips’ foreword)
- Super Mario Bros. 2, Wikipedia
- Changes from Doki Doki Panic, The Cutting Room Floor
- Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, Super Mario Wiki
- Why We’ve Always Been Wrong About the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, Den of Geek
- How Nintendo convinced the world to buy a weird Mario game, Kotaku
- Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 was nearly a Nintendo Power giveaway, Nintendo World Report
- Nintendo had massive supply shortages even in the 1980s, TweakTown
- Nintendo Power issue 1, Super Mario Wiki
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