New Super Mario Bros.: 20 years since 2D Mario came back

There's a scene everyone who owned a DS in 2006 or 2007 knows: you switch the handheld on, pick the grey cartridge with Mario's face on the label, and within three seconds you're hearing that opening jingle with the bouncing letters. No long loading screen, no epic introduction, no five-minute cutscene. Just Mario standing there waiting for you to move the D-pad. Twenty years ago, on 15 May 2006, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros. in North America — the first genuinely new 2D game in the franchise in 11 years — and the world discovered it had missed side-on Mario far more than it realised.

Why a 2D Mario was risky in 2006

The context matters here. By 2006, the "official" Mario had been 3D for more than a decade. Super Mario 64 had redefined the platformer in 1996. Sunshine came in 2002. Galaxy was in development for 2007. Nintendo was completely committed to the third dimension on its main consoles — and the market had absorbed that transition well.

The last genuinely new 2D Mario had been Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, in 1995 on the Super Nintendo. In the interim, handhelds had received the Super Mario Advance titles on the GBA, but those were remakes of NES and SNES games — excellent remakes, but not new games. An entire generation had grown up never having seen an original side-scrolling Mario.

Releasing a 2D game on a handheld in 2006, in a market dominated by talk of graphical progress, was a gamble. Nintendo didn't just release it: it delivered a game that sold more than 30.8 million copies on the DS, making it the best-selling title in the handheld's entire history.

What was inside the cartridge

The title says New, and the choice of word is almost ironic — because what Nintendo did was use a completely familiar structure as the base and build new layers on top of it with surgical precision.

Eight worlds. Desert, ice, forest and volcano themes. A flagpole at the end of each stage. Bowser in the castle of the eighth world. Anyone who had touched a Mario game in the 80s recognised the skeleton instantly. It's just that the content inside that skeleton was something else:

• Mega Mushroom — Mario grew until he nearly filled the whole screen, destroying everything in his path. Nintendo built specific stages around the mechanic, and the sensation of stomping through everything still works decades later.
• Mini Mushroom — the opposite: a tiny Mario, absurdly high jumps, access to pipes and secret passages unreachable at normal size. Some star coins were impossible without the transformation.
• Blue Shell — Mario using a Koopa shell to slide along the ground at high speed. The least memorable of the new transformations — but one that found a use in specific stages.
• Wall jump — the mechanic of climbing walls by bouncing from one side to the other, which the series carried on from there as a permanent part of the moveset.

The DS's dual screen was used with intelligent restraint: the world map sat on the bottom screen, the gameplay on the top. No touchscreen gimmicks during play. A decision that has aged better than most attempts to force the touchscreen into games of that era.

Shigeru Miyamoto in the supervisor's chair

The game's development had Shigeru Miyamoto as supervisor — the same man who created Mario in 1981, the same man who supervised 64 and Sunshine. He wasn't the day-to-day director, but his presence in the supervising seat says something about the weight Nintendo placed on the project.

The game was announced in January 2006 and released a few months later, in May. A relatively short development cycle for a title of that magnitude — which suggests the team arrived at the right formula early and didn't spend years iterating, as happens with more ambitious projects.

The result was a game that worked. Not technically ambitious — the DS had clear limitations next to what the GameCube and the Xbox were doing at the time. But technically correct: controls that responded exactly as they should, level design with consistency, difficulty balanced for most players with the real challenge reserved for the star coins and the secret worlds.

In Brazil: the DS, flashcards and the Mario everybody played somehow

The Nintendo DS reached Brazil at a prohibitive imported price, and the official local release took a while. Most Brazilian players first met the handheld through the grey market or a trip abroad — and when someone turned up with a DS, it rarely came with just one original cartridge.

The R4 and other flashcards were the reality for a large share of DS owners in Brazil between 2007 and 2010. And on every Brazilian flashcard running ROMs, New Super Mario Bros. was there. It was the hardware's unofficial demo game: it showed off the handheld's capabilities well, it was immediately understandable to anyone regardless of gaming experience, and it ran perfectly.

That distorts the official sales figures in Brazil — but it doesn't erase the cultural impact. Everyone who had a DS here played NSMB one way or another. It was the game you used to introduce the handheld to a friend who had never touched a DS. The barrier to entry was zero.

The franchise a single game created

The DS game's success opened a floodgate Nintendo wouldn't close any time soon. The New Super Mario Bros. franchise became one of the company's most profitable:

• New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009) — chaotic co-op for up to four simultaneous players, a higher difficulty level, one of the most talked-about couch co-op experiences of the Wii era
• New Super Mario Bros. 2 (2012, 3DS) — focused on the coin-collecting mechanic, the most criticised in the series for feeling merely incremental
• New Super Mario Bros. U (2012, Wii U) — the most complete of the franchise, with the Boost mode that let a fifth player use the GamePad, and the Luigi U stages as standalone content
• Both re-released on the Switch in 2019 as New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe — the definitive and most accessible version to this day

The franchise was left to rest after U Deluxe. The answer came in October 2023 with Super Mario Bros. Wonder — which kept the 2D structure but injected radical creativity back in, with the Wonder Flower mechanic transforming every stage into something different. Nintendo closed one cycle and started another, braver one.

20 years on: what stuck

The original DS NSMB has limitations nostalgia doesn't fix. The soundtrack is functional without being memorable — nothing Koji Kondo hadn't done better in the 80s. The default difficulty is accessible to the point of being low for anyone with some platformer experience. Beyond the star coins and the secret worlds, the game doesn't ask much.

But the foundation still works. The controls respond exactly. The level design has moments of quiet intelligence — stages that teach mechanics without a line of text. And the loop of playing a stage, collecting the star coins and moving on still has the right rhythm of gratification.

Anyone after the best of the franchise today will find it in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe on Switch or in Wonder — more content, more polish, more creativity. But there's something specific about going back to the original DS game, whether on an emulator or on a cartridge that still works in some DS or 3DS in a drawer: it's a game from 2006 that knew exactly what it needed to be. And that proved side-on Mario had a long life still ahead of it.

Did you play NSMB DS on the original cartridge, on a flashcard, or did you only come to the franchise through the Wii? Which stage or world do you remember most? Leave a comment. And if you want more classic platformers, there's the post on Donkey Kong Country and what Rare did with the SNES in 1994 — and also on Mega Man X and Capcom's debut in the 16-bit world.