Dr. Mario
He's got the cure!
Developer: Nintendo R&D 1
Platforms: FC / NES, Game Boy, Arcade, SFC / SNES, GBA (Multiple times)
First Release Date: July 27, 1990
To-do: Add info about later ports.
Fresh off the success of publishing and developing Tetris for Game Boy, Nintendo began on their own, fully in-house puzzle game. Dr. Mario began as a game called Virus, as we know from a 1989 prototype. It still features Mario, and has most of the gameplay complete, with different graphics. By 1990, the game was released as Dr. Mario, and alongside contemporaries like Columns and Klax, it solidified the basics of a color-matching puzzle game. Instead of an endless endurance mode, Dr. Mario has you clear each board of viruses to progress to the next level. The pill pieces you drop have pretty good physics, with quick rotations into tight spots feeling fairly intuitive. Chains are present, satisfying, and the key to getting a good score. Overall, it’s a very well-realized puzzle game, especially for how early it came in the genre.
Connie’s Community Engagement: Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka's soundtrack may be the most fondly remembered part of this game, for a lot of people. Before you play, there's always a choice to be made. Which song will you cast your vote for? Fever, or Chill? Vote below!
The game's instruction manual gives a bit of story- after many adventures, Mario has found himself working in the Mushroom Kingdom Hospital. He seems a little surprised about it too. Mario worked a lot of odd jobs in earlier games, but this one stands out a bit, doesn't it? An experiment at the hospital went wrong and viruses are spreading quickly. Dr. Mario uses his newly developed vitamins to get things under control. There’s no plot in the game proper, but there are intermission scenes every five levels. The viruses stand on a tree (or on the seafloor, in the Game Boy version), and a variety of wacky things fly (or swim) past them, while very wistful music plays. It’s a very charming addition.
The 2 player mode has you race to clear your board first. Combos will send extra pill pieces to your opponent, building from Game Boy Tetris’s versus mechanics. I think these two games get the credit for the earliest implementations of Garbage Blocks as we know them? I’ve got a lot of earlier games to check though, so don’t quote me on that yet. Just making a note for myself here.
Connie’s Commercials: I don't have any insight on this Japanese advertisement for the game. I just think it's a classic.
The viruses start closer to the top of the bottle each round, giving you less room as you go. This leads to a bit of an odd difficulty curve in each round, where the very start is the hardest part, until the game speeds up late into a round. Getting a run off the ground for the last few levels can be a rare occurrence (for me, at least), but restarting is quick and painless. If you manage to complete round 20 at high speed, you'll get one final intermission. The sky fades to night, and an ominous UFO appears, beaming up the viruses. Is this an abduction? Or are the viruses returning to their world? We can only speculate. The UFO also appears in the Game Boy version, but the viruses get eaten by a coelacanth before they get beamed up. It's probably for the best. What a good little video game!
Thank you for reading!
