The best arcade games like Super Mario Bros are Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros 3 and Rayman Legends. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made Super Mario Bros worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The best 2D Mario, with a spin jump and a cape on top.
The most inventive of the NES entries and still remarkable.
The most polished 2D platformer of the last fifteen years.
NES platforming that is kinder but just as well made.
Momentum platforming taken to its extreme.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Super Mario Bros that are not arcade games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Super Mario Bros — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Super Mario World. The best 2D Mario, with a spin jump and a cape on top.
No. Super Mario Bros released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Super Mario Bros list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.