This sneaky design detail in Super Mario Bros has blown my mind

When the original Super Mario Bros was released in 1985, it's safe to say game design was a little more basic – and that meant getting crafty with your visual assets. The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice that there's some clever sprite recycling going on with those clouds and bushes but it's not just lazy game design, there's actually an important reason behind it.

Sprite recycling isn't an uncommon phenomenon and continues today so once you start noticing it, you can't unsee it. Arguably today it's a little more subtle than the original Mario Bros, but perhaps it was easier to ignore on retro game consoles. In a world of AAA releases it's safe to say standards for game design have shifted for the better but there's still something charming about that nostalgic 8-bit design.

You'd be forgiven for missing this crafty design detail thanks to some clever recolouring and the odd sprite stitching that (at a glance) looks like a new asset. While on the surface it's a clever technique to flesh out the game's background, the sprite recycling was also a handy way for Nintendo devs to be more efficient when coding the game – with a minuscule 32 KB file size, there wasn't room for fancy details in the OG Mario Bros.

For some more recent Nintendo news take a look at Donkey Kong’s adorable new character design which was my personal highlight of the Switch 2 trailer. If you're after more gaming insight, check out the Super Mario character design facts that blew our minds.