Every Sunday we haul an exciting article out of the Eurogamer archive so you can read it again or enjoy it for the first time if you missed it. Oli's look back at the Super Mario Bros. games was originally published on 15th November 2009.

"If he finds a warp, he can jump worlds!"

In the climactic scene of the 1989 film The Wizard, a withdrawn kid called Jimmy who's a preternaturally gifted videogame player is competing at a tournament. In the final, he has to play a game he's never played before: Super Mario Bros. 3, then unreleased in the US. For over five minutes of screen time, footage of the game looms large over a screaming audience while Jimmy's brother - suddenly possessed by the spirit of the back of the box - shouts tips and game features from the sidelines.

It's a silly scene in a bad, exploitative movie. It's full of implausibilities, it's badly acted and it's an embarrassingly naked advertisement for Nintendo. But it's also humbling. 20 years ago, the money shot in a major feature film was footage of a game. The game was presented accurately and honestly, discussed in gamers' terms, and the sight of it caused waves of excitement in the audience.

It may have been kids' stuff, but the launch of Super Mario Bros. 3 was also a major cultural event attended by none of the posturing, misunderstanding and self-conscious debate that has recently swirled around the releases of Grand Theft Auto IV or Modern Warfare 2. That's real acceptance. It was what it was, and of course you loved it, how couldn't you? It was Mario.

All this happened just four years after Nintendo had re-invented the home videogame with Super Mario Bros. How on earth did we get there so fast? And where's the warp that gets us back?

Minus World You know the prehistory: in the beginning was the jump, and the jump was the man. Jumpman was the fat, comical carpenter in the Nintendo arcade game Donkey Kong. He was called Jumpman because he jumped, and he jumped because that was all there was to do. He wore dungarees so you could see his arms move, a hat because hair was hard to draw in pixels, a moustache to emphasise his large nose. "Noses say a great deal," said his creator, Shigeru Miyamoto. In his next arcade game, Jumpman acquired a proper name (Mario), a new profession (plumbing), and a brother to enable two-player gaming (Luigi). He didn't acquire any new accessories or abilities, though; he still just jumped. In Mario Bros., he battled a strange menagerie of creatures in the sewers of New York. Barring Donkey Kong retreads, it was the last time Mario would be seen in a setting that was remotely appropriate to him. But that was the point.