Full Screen Mario was created by Josh Goldberg, who at the time was a junior at the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Goldberg, who studies computer science and is a longtime
Super Mario Bros. fan, wanted to create an "impressive" project when he conceived remaking a classic game One day, he and a friend discussed "how cool it would be if you could play
Mario in [your]
browser" and determined
Super Mario Bros. was simple enough to remake. Goldberg began working on
Full Screen Mario in October 2012 and finished a working
demo the following month. From the beginning, Goldberg knew he wanted to add a map generator and a level editor;
Full Screen Mario uses the
canvas element to render the levels. Unlike the original game,
Full Screen Mario can be played in
widescreen. instead of
ripping content from a
ROM image. He used his personal copy of
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe as a reference; he also consulted images of the original game's
level designs from the internet and used them to manually recreate each level. Goldberg said this was tedious and took a considerable amount of time, but was not difficult. His greatest challenge was recreating the game's physics. According to Goldberg, "I'd never really made the physics before. People would randomly disappear during the game". Goldberg said that remaking
Super Mario Bros. was enjoyable because he could aspire to make it perfect, but it was difficult for him to perfectly recreate the original game, and he spent a lot of time scrutinizing his work to make it as close as possible. After the initial release, Goldberg switched the code base from
JavaScript to
TypeScript to help reduce program bugs and crashes. ==Release==