Here's a challenge – take a look at some of the screenshots here without any mental playback of the associated audio. Can you imagine the underground areas of Super Mario Bros without that recurring theme? Can you see Super Mario 64's title screen without thinking "It's-a me, Mario"? If you can do that, we're impressed because we certainly can't. You can hardly blame us – even the Goombas hop to the beat in Super Mario Bros, and that speaks to the importance of audio as a part of the overall Mario experience.
The music of the Super Mario Bros series is extremely widely known – according to a paper titled Video Game Music: Not Just Kid Stuff by Matthew Belinkie of Yale University, 66% of American college students polled in 1999 could hum the main theme of Super Mario Bros. The ubiquity of the NES ensured that even people who didn't necessarily own a NES themselves were exposed to that tune, including Smooth McGroove, a YouTuber famed for his a capella covers of videogame music. "I first heard it at my next door neighbour's house, along with a few other NES classics they'd play over there," he says, citing it as his favourite piece of Mario music, explaining, "It's hard to beat the original because it set the stage for the rest!"
