Top 50 Video Game Moments: Number 13

Okay, okay... this is it. The home stretch. No more playing around. Everything's been written and scheduled.

Super Mario Brothers was one of the first true video games I ever played (along with Joust and - weirdly enough - Jaws for the NES, where I mostly just sailed the boat around and waited for the shark to devour me). There are any number of nostalgic moments I could've picked from the game.

* The first goomba stomp
* The first fire flower
* The first castle (that music... shiver)
* The first time I found the warp pipe
* That one jump in world 8 that seemed impossible until we played it so much that it became second nature.

I'm not picking any of them, and I'm not picking "your princess is in another castle!" like a lot of other folks do. I remember being so incredibly pumped that I beat the koopa in the first castle that I didn't much care about the princess. In fact, I had never read the manual, so the idea of the princess being in another castle didn't strike me as so much a 'wtf' as a 'oh, there's a princess? huh'. The moment in question actually came a year or two later, when I was 8. There aren't any spoilers, so there's no need for a jump, but jumps are how I roll, so read on.