Dr. Mario: Nintendo's Plumber Puts On a Lab Coat

Mario has held a lot of jobs. He started as a carpenter, became a plumber, moonlighted as a referee, a boxing coach and a go-kart racer. In 1990 he added the strangest line to his resume yet. He put on a white coat, picked up a jar of oversized pills, and started fighting a disease with colour-matching. Dr. Mario is the game where Nintendo's mascot became a physician, and it turned out he had a very good bedside manner.

Fever or Chill? Choose your soundtrack, choose your fate.

A puzzle in a lab coat

The setup is pure Nintendo: simple to grasp, brutal to master. A playfield fills from the bottom with viruses in three colours, red, yellow and blue. From the top, Dr. Mario tosses down two-tone capsules, and you rotate and slide each one as it falls. Line up four matching colours in a row or column and they vanish, taking any same-coloured viruses with them. Clear every virus and the level is won. Let the capsules stack to the top and the doctor loses his patient.

It sounds gentle. It is not. Because each pill carries two colours, every piece is a small negotiation: place it to clear a red virus and you may strand a yellow half somewhere awkward. The higher levels bury the screen in viruses and speed the pills up until the whole thing becomes a test of nerve. On the Game Boy, where the four colours were rendered as four shades of grey, players learned to read the viruses by their little animated faces as much as their tone.

Riding the Tetris wave

Dr. Mario did not appear in a vacuum. It arrived in 1990, right in the middle of the puzzle mania that Tetris had unleashed. Tetris had shown Nintendo that a puzzle could sell a console, and the company was hungry for another. Dr. Mario was Nintendo's own answer, developed in-house and launched on the NES and the Game Boy at the same time, so that both the living room and the pocket had a falling-block habit to feed.

Where Tetris was abstract and Soviet-cool, Dr. Mario was warm and cartoonish, wrapped in a friendly medical joke. Crucially, the Game Boy version supported the link cable, so two players could go head to head, dropping viruses on each other's screens with every combo. That competitive streak is a big part of why the game never really went away.

Fever and Chill

Ask anyone who played Dr. Mario what they remember and, sooner or later, they will start humming. The game offered a choice of two background tunes, named Fever and Chill, both composed by Nintendo's Hirokazu Tanaka. Fever is the bright, bouncing one that everybody knows; Chill is its cooler, jazzier sibling. Being able to pick your soundtrack before a session was a small luxury in 1990, and the tunes have long outlived the hardware, resurfacing in later Nintendo games and in the Super Smash Bros. series.

The doctor keeps practising

Few Nintendo puzzle games have proved as durable. Dr. Mario has been re-released, remade and reinvented across almost every Nintendo system since, from the Nintendo 64 to the Switch, occasionally handing the coat to Luigi. The formula barely changes, because it barely needs to. A jar of viruses, two-colour pills and one earworm remains a near-perfect design.

Dr. Mario Complete-in-Box

That is what makes the original Game Boy cartridge such a satisfying thing to hold. Everything the series would ever be is already there, in four shades of grey, ready to ruin an afternoon.

You can see this copy of Dr. Mario in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.