Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt

Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt is a dual-game cartridge released by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 in North America, bundling two of the platform's most iconic early titles into a single package that became the standard pack-in game sold alongside the NES Control Deck for much of the console's commercial peak. By 1988, the NES had already established itself as the dominant home console in North America following its nationwide rollout in 1985 and 1986, and this bundle capitalized on that momentum by giving new owners immediate access to two distinct gameplay experiences at no extra cost. Super Mario Bros., originally released in arcades and on the Famicom in 1985, is a side-scrolling platformer in which the player controls Mario through eight worlds, each divided into four stages, navigating enemies such as Goombas and Koopa Troopas, collecting coins and power-ups including the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Super Star, and ultimately rescuing Princess Toadstool from Bowser. The D-pad controls movement and crouching, the A button handles jumping — with jump height and distance determined by how long the button is held — and the B button is used to run and throw fireballs when the Fire Flower power-up is active. Level design ranges from overworld grasslands and underground caverns to underwater stages, ghost-free castle interiors, and airborne cloud platforms, demanding precise timing and spatial awareness that escalates sharply in the later worlds. Duck Hunt, developed alongside the Zapper light gun peripheral, tasks the player with shooting ducks — presented either one or two at a time depending on the selected game mode — as they fly across a static outdoor scene within a limited time window per round. A third mode features clay-pigeon-style shooting targets rather than ducks. The Zapper works by detecting a brief flash of white light the television emits at the target's position when the trigger is pulled, a hardware trick that only functions correctly on CRT televisions. The laughing dog character that appears when the player misses a duck became one of the most recognizable — and for many players, most frustrating — images associated with the NES era. In its time, the bundle was praised for delivering immediate, accessible fun to new NES owners while demonstrating the hardware's versatility: one cartridge showcased precise platforming mechanics and the other demonstrated peripheral-based input in a living-room shooting gallery context. The pairing made the NES feel like a complete entertainment system out of the box, and the cartridge's ubiquity meant that Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt were often the first NES games millions of players ever experienced.