Hard to overstate this one. After the 1983 crash gutted American gaming, Super Mario Bros. (1985) arrived bundled with the NES and quietly resurrected the whole industry.

Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka built the template every platformer still borrows from: tight controls, secrets that reward curiosity, and World 1-1, the most-studied minute of level design ever made, teaching you the entire game without a word of text. A Goomba walks at you so you learn that touching things hurts. A question block sits where your first jump naturally lands. The first pipe is short enough to clear and the first pit is narrow enough to survive. Nothing in that screen is an accident.

The technical side is just as remarkable. The whole game fits in 40 kilobytes. Thirty-two stages, the overworld, the underground, the castles and the water levels, all of it, in less space than a single photograph off your phone. The clouds and the bushes are the same sprite in different colors. That sort of reuse is not laziness, it's the only way the thing fits.

Then there's the feel of it, which is where the real craft hides. Mario accelerates rather than snapping to top speed, keeps a little momentum when you let go, and the height of his jump depends on how long you hold the button. Hold right in midair and you steer. None of that was standard in 1985, and it's why the game still plays well when its contemporaries feel stiff.

Koji Kondo wrote the overworld theme on a tiny set of channels, then reused the same melody at double speed for the hurry-up warning, which is a neat trick for a sound chip with nothing to spare.

For a lot of us it was simply the first game. The warp pipes, the fire flower, the run-button physics. More than 40 million copies went out. I keep my copy not because it's rare, but because it's the one that started it all.