Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels

Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels began as Super Mario Bros. 2, released for Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1986. Rather than changing the original game’s side-scrolling formula, it made that formula more demanding. Players still travel through the Mushroom Kingdom, clear platforming stages, and ultimately rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. This time, however, the game expects familiarity with the first Super Mario Bros. Its narrow landings, deceptive obstacles, and difficult jumps made it a sequel aimed at players who had already mastered Mario’s earlier adventure.

At the start, players choose either Mario or Luigi; the game does not offer the original’s alternating two-player mode. That choice affects play. Luigi jumps higher than Mario but has less traction, making him useful for reaching distant platforms and harder to control on small ones. The Lost Levels also introduces the Poison Mushroom, a power-up lookalike that harms Mario or Luigi instead of helping them. Wind can push the characters during jumps, while hidden blocks and unusually placed enemies punish assumptions learned from the first game. Some Warp Zones even send players backward rather than ahead.

The Japanese release’s title created a complication outside Japan. Nintendo released a different game called Super Mario Bros. 2 in North America and Europe: a version of Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic adapted with Mario characters. As a result, the two regions knew different games by the same sequel number. The Japanese game eventually reached Western audiences under the name Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels in Super Mario All-Stars, the 1993 Super Nintendo collection. That version remade its graphics and sound alongside those of other early Mario games.

The Lost Levels has eight main worlds, but finishing Bowser’s castle need not end a player’s exploration. Clearing the game without using a Warp Zone opens World 9, a secret set of stages. The original Famicom Disk System version also rewards repeated completions by unlocking the additional lettered Worlds A through D. These extras extend a game already built around persistence and precise control.

Its history makes The Lost Levels more than an unusually hard Mario game. It preserves a distinct branch of the series: a direct Japanese follow-up to the 1985 original, later separated from the Western sequel by its new title. Playing it reveals how closely Nintendo could reuse the first game’s familiar terrain while changing the experience through character handling, misleading items, and level layouts designed to catch even experienced players off guard.