Apparently, the original "Super Mario Bros." has way more levels than 32 or so. It has hundreds of them! Those levels are hidden away in every cartridge that is gathering dust in the boxes at our homes. They also weren’t intended to be found as they are “broken” and messed up. For example, there are enemies that have no place within them, like a Goomba underwater…
However, some Nintendo enthusiasts have cracked the process and were able to unlock these hidden levels. Here is how you can do it.
There's one well-known secret world in the original 'Super Mario Bros.' — it's called the 'Negative World.'
It's just one of many of the hidden levels contained in "Super Mario Bros.," and it's perhaps the most widely known. You can reach it by performing an awkward backwards jump in the game's second level, 1-2, like so:
It's so-named because of the '-1' seen in the 'World' area of the screen:
The level itself is just a standard underwater level, though it's impossible to progress beyond it. Exiting the level results in a loop.
But that's just the beginning. There's a far more involved hack that enables anyone to access hundreds of hidden levels in the original 'Super Mario Bros.' You need three items to pull it off — first up: an original 'Super Mario Bros.' cartridge:
And a copy of 'Tennis' for the original Nintendo Entertainment System:
And a top-loading Nintendo Entertainment System:
First things first, insert 'Super Mario Bros.' into the NES and start playing.
Like this guy, but with a top-loading NES instead of an original model.
At any point during the first level, 1-1, pull the cartridge out of the system while the system remains powered on.
BEWARE: Yes, this might break your NES, and your game. Try this at your own risk.
Replace the 'Super Mario Bros.' cartridge with the 'Tennis' cartridge in your top-loading NES. Press the reset button. The menu screen should appear, like so:
Start a one-player game and get moving around.
When 'Super Mario Bros.' reloads, it will load into one of the hundreds of secret levels in the game. Just look at this:
Even crazier? Every time you do the trick, you get a different secret level:
And:
If you can get your hands on a working Game Genie — a device for hacking "cheats" into games —there's an even easier way to just input a code and access all these levels.
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