Take a wild guess which game was the world’s best-selling one 40 years ago, in 1986. It was Super Mario Bros. (1985), and it became a global icon because it was both a superb game and, maybe even more importantly, the right game at the right moment. It arrived after the 1983 North American video-game crash, when retailers were wary of consoles. Nintendo repositioned the NES as a family entertainment system, and Mario was simply so good and polished that it felt worth buying. It sold tens of millions of copies, helped make the NES a household fixture, and almost single-handedly reanimated the console-gaming market. The Super Mario franchise is still going strong and is close to cracking the 1 billion (!) units-sold mark, an absolutely insane figure.