Shigeru Miyamoto says Super Mario Bros.’ biggest invention was avoiding the Bowser fight

Shigeru Miyamoto has identified what he considers one of the biggest inventions in the original Super Mario Bros., and it was not Mario’s jumping, power-ups or side-scrolling world. For the Nintendo designer, the breakthrough was realizing players did not actually need to fight Bowser directly.

Miyamoto discussed the 1985 NES game during an October 22 press conference at Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters after being selected to receive Japan’s Order of Culture.

Miyamoto said the development team originally faced a simple problem. If players spent the entire game progressing toward a boss, conventional game design suggested they should stop and fight that boss at the end.

Creating a satisfying battle was proving difficult, so Miyamoto reconsidered the problem around the rule already defining Super Mario Bros.: Mario keeps moving toward the right side of the screen. Nintendo realized players could simply jump over Bowser, reach the axe behind him and collapse the bridge. 

The solution allowed the final encounter to preserve the same movement and controls used throughout the rest of the game instead of introducing an entirely different combat system. Later Mario games would develop more elaborate fights with Bowser, but Miyamoto remembered the original solution as a particularly important design breakthrough.

Miyamoto also explained how Nintendo approached the wider design of Super Mario Bros.. Earlier games such as Donkey Kong focused on moving between fixed points, while side-scrolling technology allowed Mario to travel continuously through a larger world.

The team built the game around simple actions such as running, jumping and swimming. Miyamoto described the concept through “land, sea and air,” with Mario gradually gaining access to different forms of movement.

Those mechanics helped define the Mushroom Kingdom itself. Rather than creating the world first and designing gameplay around it, Nintendo built locations and obstacles around the actions it wanted players to perform.

The comments came after Miyamoto was named a 2026 recipient of Japan’s Order of Culture, which recognizes contributions to the country’s cultural development. He is the first recipient honored specifically for work in gaming.

Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 and later played major roles in creating Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. During the press conference, he stressed that those games were collaborative projects and said he viewed the award as recognition of the teams he worked with.

The Order of Culture ceremony is scheduled for November 3 at Japan’s Imperial Palace. More than 40 years after Super Mario Bros. launched, Miyamoto’s explanation of the Bowser encounter shows how one of Nintendo’s most recognizable moments emerged from solving a straightforward development problem.