I think the main reason SMB3 has such an inordinately high reputation compared to basically any other NES game is its extreme length masking its lack of challenge. It's a 2 hour long game for a casual playthrough, 3 if you're bad at platforming. It's relatively easy, and nowhere near as esoteric as other retro titles, but there was this idea that being able to beat any NES game was an achievement unto itself, so people assumed long = hard. Because kids in the early 90s got filtered by practically their entire libraries, SMB3 stood out as the one thing they could actually complete; all you needed was a small time investment, the game basically plays itself for 60% of the runtime. Keep in mind that most of SMB3's levels aren't even fully-realized concepts, so much as a flat plane, followed by a single gimmick iterated once or twice, and then it ends. "Nintendo Hard" was such a strong idea back then that it made people believe literally anything Nintendo made was hard even when it wasn't. In SMB3 you can tank multiple hits, every five steps you're rewarded with powerups, most enemies have simple patterns and are easy to avoid. But because there's so much variety stretched over such a big map this gives the illusion that you're playing a deep and engaging masterpiece testing the limits of games as a medium. The idea that a game isn't good because it requires skill or knowledge of abstract ideas, but because it throws many things at you and is essentially a dopamine factory, that all comes from SMB3. I don't even dislike the game but whenever I see it brought up in all-time great discussions I have to assume it's coming from someone who is either terminally afraid of moving on from their childhood or just straight up hasn't played more than maybe 15 games in their entire life.
>>729702149I have another theory: it was just incredibly polished and it didn't age
>>729702693fpbpalso op is a fag
