In 2003, an electronic voting system in Belgium reported that a political party received more votes than was possible—a result that was attributed to a glitch caused by a cosmic ray.

In 2021, someone paid $2M for an unopened 'Super Mario Bros.'

The collectibles site Rally announced in 2021 that an unopened "Super Mario Bros." cartridge sold for $2M. That's the highest price ever paid for a video game.

Nintendo developed the character as its technology improved

Nintendo developed the Mario character as video game technology became more sophisticated. In 1991, Charles Martinet began playing Mario at trade shows and then voiced the character for 1996’s “Super Mario 64,” which included the now-classic catchphrase, “It’s a-me, Mario!”

'Super Mario Bros.' teaches players its rules as they go

Rather than constantly climbing up the screen from platform to platform like “Donkey Kong,” “Super Mario Bros.” moves from left to right. In anticipation of gamers’ confusion with the new style, Miyamoto designed the first level as a walk-through, allowing players to learn the rules without reading a manual.

The video game Mario Bros. was a spin-off of the wildly popular Donkey Kong, another Nintendo title that featured a carpenter named Mario.

‘Super Mario Bros.’ was influenced by ‘Alice in Wonderland’

In 1985’s “Super Mario Bros.,” Mario and Luigi grow larger—becoming “Super Mario Bros.”—if they ingested mushrooms. “...if you think of stories like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and other types of fairy tales, mushrooms always seem to have a mysterious power, and so we thought the mushroom would be a good symbol for why they get it and get big,” Miyamoto told NPR in 2015.

Nintendo's Mario was named after the landlord of the company's American headquarters.

The levels for 'Super Mario Bros.' were designed by hand

Miyamoto and codesigner Takashi Tezuka sketched the world of the game—called Mushroom Kingdom—by hand before handing it off to developers. In the interview below, they show off some of those original illustrations.

The game turned Mario into a pop culture icon

The character has appeared in over 200 games and has had his own movies, television shows, and other kinds of entertainment.

Mario's archnemesis hosted a children's show in the 1980s

"Super Mario Bros." grew so popular in the '80s, even King Koopa, the video game's villain, had his own television show, though it's been all but erased from TV history. There's good reason for that: It was a bizarre enterprise, featuring '30s cartoons, a grumpy stand-up comedian, and cheap production.

Play a puzzle game where the speed of light is reduced to everyday speeds

In "Velocity Raptor," space and time warp as you make your way across a room of obstacles at "normal" speeds. Take advantage of these relativistic effects to solve puzzles involving clocks running at different rates and colors shifting as a result of your movement.

How the inventor of Mario designs games

Shigeru Miyamoto has created some of the most iconic video games in history, from Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong to The Legend of Zelda. The game producer boils down his creative philosophy to three basic principles: story, simplicity, and...

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for $3M, making it the most valuable video game cartridge ever auctioned.

'Super Mario Bros.' helped save the video game industry

A 1983 crash left the industry in tatters, desperate for a hit. Nintendo’s focus on a more immersive home experience was realized in “Super Mario Bros.,” bringing the industry from the arcade to the living room. The title eventually sold over 40 million units.

In comic books, cosmic rays have been described as capable of accelerating evolution, granting humans superpowers, restoring health and energy, and powering advanced technology.

Most of the 'Super Mario Bros.' sequel was borrowed from a preexisting Nintendo game

Nintendo was eager to create a sequel following the success of "Super Mario Bros.," but the original "Super Mario Bros. 2," released in Japan, proved too difficult. Crunched for time, the company used the bones of a preexisting game, "Doki Doki Panic," and inserted elements from Mario's world for the US release of "Super Mario Bros. 2," making for a follow-up that was drastically different from its predecessor.

'Super Mario Bros.' was released in 1985

The game was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka and published by Nintendo in Japan and North America in 1985. It’s seen as a landmark in the history of video games and minted the Mario character as a pop culture icon.

Since computers rely on the distribution of electrons in microchips to represent binary code, cosmic rays and ionizing radiation from radioactive elements can introduce software errors by detaching electrons from atoms.

Listen to the evolution of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. theme, 'Ground Theme.'

1993's 'Super Mario Bros.,' the first live-action feature film based on a video game, was a massive commercial flop.

Human teleportation through quantum principles raises questions about identity

Through quantum entanglement, particles have been "teleported" by measuring their state in one location and effectively transferring that state to a new location. Doing so for the particles that make up humans would destroy the state of the original particles, killing the person, and effectively creating a clone.

The design changed video games forever

Miyamoto’s direction and Kondo’s sound showed younger generations the potential of video games, inspiring a more sophisticated form that moved far beyond the one-dimensional entertainment of the arcade era.

The game’s theme was the first video game composition added to the Library of Congress

Koji Kondo’s “Ground Theme,” the opening music for “Super Mario Bros.” was added to the National Recording Registry in 2023. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” Kondo said. “It's actually a little bit difficult to believe.”

'Stadium Events' is one of the rarest Nintendo games

A Y2K glitch billed one VHS renter $91,000 for a movie

At a video store in upstate New York, a date rollover error marked a customer’s 1999 rental as 100 years overdue, resulting in a $91,250 bill. The store quickly fixed the bug and gave him a free rental as consolation.

Cosmic rays are thought to be accelerated to near the speed of light by repeatedly bouncing across shockwaves produced by high-energy cosmic events, such as supernovae.

Watch a YouTuber solve a Rubik's Cube while in free fall

He broke a world record, completing the task in the sky in just 23.333 seconds.

NASA fixed Voyager 1’s glitchy memory from 24 billion kilometers away

In November 2023, Voyager 1 began sending unusable data due to a stuck bit in a decades-old memory chip. After months of investigation, engineers managed to reroute the faulty code to a new memory location, restoring functionality in April 2024.

Particles produced in cosmic ray showers that would normally decay long before they reach Earth's surface are observed in ground-based detectors because they experience time more slowly when moving near the speed of light—a phenomenon predicted by special relativity.

Cosmic rays are evidence of incredibly powerful astronomical events—solar cosmic rays provide information about eruptions and flares on the sun's surface, while galactic cosmic rays shed light on dying stars.

The mushrooms in 'Super Mario Bros.' are modeled after a real mushroom

Almost every mushroom in "Super Mario Bros." is based on the Amanita muscaria, sometimes referred to as the fly agaric, because it is known to attract flies. It's also the basis for the original mushroom emoji and the mushrooms from the popular game "Minecraft."

Atari buried hundreds of thousands of video games in the New Mexico desert

The video game industry crashed in 1983, leaving the company with an enormous inventory. Looking to offload the excess, the company secretly had 800,000 cartridges buried in the desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For decades, the story was believed to be an urban legend, but documentary filmmakers pursued the story and, in 2014, unearthed the games.

The Year 2038 problem is the next potential computer time rollover bug

Many older systems store time as a signed 32-bit integer counting seconds since Jan. 1, 1970. That counter maxes out on Jan. 19, 2038—overflowing into negative time and sending clocks back to 1901, potentially crashing any older software that depends on accurate dates.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dressed as Mario at the Olympics

In a 2016 ceremony at that year’s Summer Games in Rio, Abe dressed as Super Mario to celebrate his country hosting the 2020 Olympics. It was a logical move: The character is one of the most recognizable characters in the world and someone who’s now associated with Japanese culture.

The hypothetical particle that travels faster than light

Astrophysicists inspired by science fiction developed the theory of the tachyon—a Greek word for "fast"—which is a field or particle hypothetically able to travel faster than light. Although no experiments have confirmed any part of it, it's a fun theory to consider.