If asked to name a video game character, most people would immediately say either Mario, Sonic, , or Lara Croft. Indeed, surveys have shown that Mario, Nintendo's most famous and most enduring character, is more recognisable to children than real-life celebrities. He has starred in numerous games, and has also had brief appearances in many others, though the player generally has to search for him. This entry looks at the various games Mario has starred in, and will do no more than mention the TV show, stationary, kitchen utensils, and breakfast cereal. There.

Characters

There are quite a few characters in the Mario games. Here is a quick list of the more important ones.

Arcade

Donkey Kong (Arcade, 1981)

Donkey Kong 2 (Arcade, 1983)

Mario Bros.. (Arcade, 1983)

Donkey Kong Jr (Arcade, 1985)

In Japan in the late 1970s, the arcades were extremely popular, many companies were making a lot of money from them - indeed, a game called Space Invaders caused a shortage of Y100 coins. Nintendo had jus released its first video game console, the Colour TV Game 6. It did not do as well as was hoped, and so Nintendo hired a bunch of young aspiring video game designers to create new games to both help sell the CTVG6 and to increase profits in the arcade. Among these was one Shigeru Miyamoto, who is considered by most gamers to be one of the most influential video game designers ever.

Initially, Miyamoto-san was assigned to work with another designer, Gunpei Yokoi (RIP), who had invented much on Nintendo's early hardware and would go on to create the hugely successful Game Boy. Anyway, they were originally assigned to work on a shooting game called Radarscope ; when that was finished, Miyamoto-san was granted permission to create his own game.

Miyamoto-san's initial idea was a game based on the cartoon series PopEye , which was popular back then (about 1980). The idea was the Bluto would kidnap Olive Oyl and hold her at the top of a lot of scaffolding, and PopEye would have to climb up and rescue her, while Bluto dropped barrels on him. However, Nintendo could not get permission to use PopEye, and so PopEye became a guy called Jumpman, who was later renamed Mario after a Nintendo warehouse worker. Also, Bluto became a gorilla called Monkey Kong, and this was later mistranslated into Donkey Kong . The game was released in 1981.

Another Donkey Kong was released in 1983, and then Donkey Kong Jr. appeared in 1985. This time, Mario imprisoned DK, and so the player controlled DK's son, DK Jr. as he attempted to get six keys t rescue his dad.

In 1983, Nintendo released Mario Bros.. . In this game, Mario and Luigi were placed in amongst a whole bunch of platforms and pipes, and their job was to defeat the 'pests' which were roaming around by jumping directly underneath them and hitting the platforms directly underneath them. This would flip the pests over, and running into them when they were like this gained the player points. However, if the player took too long, then the pests would get up again and move even faster. The pests included spiky turtles, crabs, and insects, among others.

As well as this, there were a lot of Game + Watch games going around starring Mario and Luigi. The Game + Watch was a simple handheld gaming device, each featuring one simple but generally rather addictive game, and a clock. There are too many different games to list here, but they all had the player doing all kinds of things, from jumping around to loading milk trucks

Platform

Super Mario Bros.. (NES, 1985)

Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels (NES, 1986)

Super Mario Brothers 2 (1988, NES)

Super Mario Land (1989, Game Boy)

Super Mario Brothers 3 (1990, NES)

Super Mario World (1991, SNES)

Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins (1992, Game Boy)

Super Mario 64 (1996, Nintendo64)

Super Mario DX (1999, Game Boy Colour)

Super Mario Advance (2001, Game Boy Advance)

Super Mario Advance 2 (2002, Game Boy Advance)

Super Mario Sunshine (2002, GameCube)

Super Mario 128 (200X, GameCube/N5)

These are the games Mario is most famous for - platformers, i.e. games which involve running around and jumping a lot. For the first few of these of these, the idea is to run from one end of the level to the other, grabbing any possible coins, and getting to the end within a time limit. In the end, Mario would rescue Princess Toadstool from the evil Bowser, a gigantic spiky turtle fire-breathing. For Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels , it was impossible to retrace steps - if you missed something, that was it. The later games removed this, allowing the player to backtrack as much as they liked, which allowed the levels to become somewhat more complex. It should be noted, however, that Super Mario Bros. 2 was not really a Mario game - it was jus a remake of an older game, Doki Doki Panic , this time with Mario characters.

Super Mario Brothers 3 took the basic formula of the Mario games and expanded on it. For one thing, the levels were now shown on a large map, with roads linking them. Finishing a level opened up the road to the next level, and so on until the player reached the end. This meant that for the most part, levels could be tackled in any order, whenever the player felt ready. There were also two different exits in each level, and a whole lot of secret levels. In Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins , all the levels were grouped into zones, such as Macro Zone, Mario zone, etc., and all zones except for the last one could be accessed at any time after completing the first one. Completing an entire zone rewarded the player with a Golden Coin, and six of these enabled access to the final zone. Most of the rest of the games in the list above were similar in execution, and Super Mario Advance 1 and 2 were little more than remakes of Super Mario World and Super Mario World respectively.

Super Mario 64 was the first 3D Mario game, and also the first 3D platform game. For this to work, major changes had to be made to the structure of the game. For a start, 3D levels took a lot longer to programme than 2D ones, and so Miyamoto-san came up with the idea of having multiple objectives in each level - each one contained seven stars, each of which required different tasks to be completed, and thus for the level to be played multiple times. Six stars per level could only be collected one at a time, and the seventh (obtained by getting 100 coins - in all the other Mario games except Super Mario Sunshine , 100 coins gave an extra life) could be collected at any time. It was also often necessary for the player to return to levels after unlocking stuff in other levels to help them. When 70 stars were collected out of a possible 120 (15 levels plus another 15 secret levels with one star each), the door to the final level opened. Super Mario Sunshine was extremely similar, so much so that it caused many Nintendo fans to fear that their favourite video game company was running out of ideas. In this game, Mario had a water pack which he could use to wash away graffiti, lava, and other liquids, and to help defeat enemies. A new game is currently in development; Nintendo is refusing to reveal any details of it at all, claiming that it is so original that they don't want people to steal their ideas.

RPG

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES, 1996)

Paper Mario (Nintendo64, 2001)

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga (Game Boy Advance, 2004)

Many Mario games had for a long time featured elements from Role Playing Games, such as adventuring across world maps and recovering items to gain entrance to the castle where the final bad guy dwells. However, they did not have any of the more strategic features, such as various types of attack for different enemies, or talking to people to get information. For this reason, Nintendo commissioned independent video game developer SquareSoft (now Square Enix) to create a full RPG starring Mario and his friends. The plot was as follows: Help Needed . This entailed travelling around different locations, in a similar style to Square Enix's popular Final Fantasy video game series, with the ultimate aim of reaching Bowser and defeating him.

Shortly after Legend of the Seven Stars was released in America, SquareSoft stopped developing for Nintendo and instead focused on the Sony PlayStation. Nintendo then created a Mario RPG all by themselves, called Paper Mario . This game poked fun at 2D games, by having the characters actually made out of paper; when Mario went to bed, he literally drifted in. When he entered a house, the paper walls were shown falling down so that the player could see inside. The plot was daft as always; Bowser gatecrashes a party Peach is throwing, kicks Mario out, and fires the whole castle into the sky. Business as usual for Mario.

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga is the latest Mario game to be released. Instead of controlling just one Mario Brother in this game, the player controls both Mario and Luigi at the same time. Containing both platform and RPG sections, this game sees the Mario's attempting to Help Needed . This is actually finished relatively early on, but here are a lot of other things to do in order to keep people playing.

Sport

Mario Golf (Nintendo64, 1999)

Mario Golf (Game Boy Colour, 1999,)

Mario Tennis (Nintendo64, 2001)

Mario Tennis (Game Boy Colour, 2001)

Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (GameCube, 2003)

Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (Game Boy Advance, 2003)

Mario Tennis GC (GameCube, 200X)

It is surprising that professional players say that these games are more realistic than games which try to be, but this the reason for this is quite simple. In many sports games, the player must consider things such as velocity, spin, angle of grip, etc. Real players, on the other hand, do not; they simply hit the ball in a way which they know from past experience and muscle memory will (or at least should) be successful. The Mario sport series, coded not by Nintendo but by a licensed independent developer called Camelot, used the same idea, that realism should come by ease of play and not by perfectly matching Newton's Laws - though they did. There was also an option to transfer data between the GBC and N64 version, so that a player who had increased their stats in one game could transfer their character to the other. This is also present in of Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour , though at the time of writing, it is not known whether the GC Tennis game will have similar features.

Racing

Super Mario Kart (SNES, 1992)

Mario Excitebike (sic) (SNES, 1995)

Super Mario Kart 64 (Nintendo64, 1996)

Super Mario Kart: Super Circuit (Game Boy Advance, 2001)

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (GameCube, 2003)

The idea here is simple: a bunch of Mario characters get into go-karts and have big races around tracks based on the Mario world. Various weapons are available, such as shells, homing shell, and banana skins. The original was released to huge acclaim in 1992, and was a critical and commercial blockbuster. A lot of people believed that games could not possibly get any better, and two-player races and battle mode meant that it was one of the most played games at the time. In fact, it is still widely regarded as one of the best video games ever.

After this, there were very high expectations for the sequel, as the increased power of the N64 would surely allow for even greater playing. However, almost everyone who had played the original were disappointed, citing track design as the main flaw - they believed that the tracks were too wide and boring. There was also the matter that the feather weapon had been removed. This allowed the player to jump up high and access shortcuts. However, anyone who had never played the first game loved Super Mario Kart 64 , and it did sell well with few people going so far as to trade it in. After this, the GBA version had almost exactly the same play style as the original, and in fact it was even possible to find the original tracks hidden away in it.

For the GC game, Nintendo felt that a game similar to Super Mario Kart 64 would not satisfy many of their fans, while new players would be looking for something technically impressive, and so it was decided to create an entirely new way of playing the game. In this one, instead of one person on the kart, there were two! One character drove, while the other rode on the back and fired weapons. The driver could also hold onto a weapon, and the positions of the two could be changed at will. This also introduced a new way of multi-player gaming, as it was possible to have two players working together, one doing the driving and the other doing the firing. The game was well received and sold exceedingly well, but many critics said that it was still not as good the first game, released over 11 years previously.

Mario Excitebike , meanwhile, is a remake of Nintendo's popular NES game Excitebike with Mario characters. This game was only available in Japan via special download.

Fighting

Super Smash Bros.. (Nintendo64, 1999)

Super Smash Bros.. Mêlée (GameCube, 2002)

Strictly speaking, these are not Mario games. What they actually are is a whole bunch of Nintendo's most popular characters brought together to beat the crap out of each other. However, the Mario games are more represented than the others, with the original having several Mario characters and the others being the only ones from their specific series. The sequel had multiple characters from the various series, but once again, there are more Mario characters than others. Characters come from other series such as The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Fire Emblem, F-Zero, Starfox, Kirby, Earthbound, Metroid, and Ice Climber .

The Super Smash Bros. games are quite different to other fighting games. For one thing, there are no health bars. Instead, as characters are injured, they accumulate damage percentage points, which can theoretically reach infinity. The higher the damage percentage, the further the character will fly when hit. The aim of the game is to knock the other players off. This is simplified by having the fact that the games are 2D, though they look 3D. They are mainly aimed at multi-player gaming, though there is quite a lot of stuff in the single-player modes as well.

Super Smash Bros. Mêlée was not so much a sequel as an update, as it simply took the basic plan on Super Smash Bros.. and added better graphics and sound, and a few challenges other than fighting (for example, smashing targets). There are four game modes: Classic (defeat all enemies, one at a time), Adventure (defeat enemies and complete eclectic challenges), All-Star (defeat all enemies, but suffer cumulative battle damage. In this mode, the player only has one life and three opportunities to recover.), and Challenge Match (complete a series of themed and special-condition matches.) This game also has a lot of trophies to collect of various Nintendo characters and stuff, which can be gotten during the course of Classic, Adventure, and All-Star modes, won on a lottery, or earned by doing various things, such as finishing different Challenge Matches, finishing Classic mode on hard difficulty, etc.

Party

Mario Party (Nintendo64, 1997)

Mario Party 2 (Nintendo64, 1999)

Mario Party 3 (Nintendo64, 2001)

Mario Party 4 (GameCube, 2002)

Mario Party 5 (GameCube, 2003)

Though these games each have a daft plot, it is really just a formality. The way the game works is that a bunch of Nintendo characters take part in a gigantic board game, rolling dice to move around, and trying to collect the most stars. Stars can be obtained by doing certain actions, or by spending coins won in mini-games. A mini-game automatically occurs at the end of every round (one round consists of each player rolling the virtual dice and moving across the board), and sometimes it occurs before the end of a round based on where a player lands. The mini-games will involve all the players (if there are less than four, the computer will take over any non-players), and have them doing practically anything, for example, catching falling blobs of ice cream or inflating balloons. The mini-games may be all against all, two on two, or three on one. This series is seriously geared towards multi-player gaming, so much so that many magazines discourage buying them unless you can get three friends over whenever you want to play. It is also generally accepted that they are all basically the same, and there is little real point in owning more than one.

Miscellaneous

Dr. Mario (NES, 1990)

Mario Paint (SNES, 1992)

Mario and Wario (SNES, 1993)

Mario's Time Machine (SNES, 1995)

Mario's Early Years - Pre-School Fun (SNES, 1995)

Mario's Picross (SNES, 1995)

Over the years, there have been some rather strange games which seem to have little to do with Mario, and indeed just seem to have his face in them in order to sell games. Mario's Time Machine and Mario's Early Years - Pre-School Fun are all much-disliked edutainment games, though puzzle games such as Dr. Mario, Mario and Wario, and Mario's Picross have received better receptions. Mario Paint is little different from the paint programmes found in most PCs nowadays.

Non-Mario

Some characters who initially appear alongside Mario become so popular that games are made starring them. It seems proper to round of the entry with a look at these.

Wario

Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land (Game Boy, 1993)

Wario's Woods (NES, 1994)

Wario Land 2 (Game Boy Colour, 1998)

Wario Land 3 (Game Boy Colour, 2000)

Wario Land 4 (Game Boy Advance, 2002)

Wario Ware (Game Boy Advance, 2003)

Wario Ware (GameCube, 2003)

Wario World (GameCube, 2003)

Wario began as the bad guy of Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins , but was a such a strong character that Nintendo was move to give him a game all to himself. This then became so popular that it spawned an entire series. For the most part, the Wario games are quite similar to the Mario games, except that where Mario collects coins, Wario collects gems. Later Wario games are more like a combination of platform and puzzle, with Wario being invincible, but prone to getting stuck. He can suffer various injuries and deformities to help him in his quest, for example, getting set on fire so that he can run fast. The Wario Ware games are unique; rather than being logical or coherent, they consist of waves of four-second mini-games, both original and based on bits of old Nintendo games.

Yoshi

Yoshi's Cookie (SNES, 1992)

Yoshi's Safari (SNES, 1993)

Yoshi's Oven (SNES, 1994)

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES, 1995)

Yoshi's Story (Nintendo64, 1997)

Yoshi is an extremely popular character, and one of the Nintendo's most distinctive creations. His games tend to be aimed at younger players, with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and Yoshi's Story being essentially child-oriented (for want of a better word) platform games, with the former taking quite a similar style to Super Mario World . The others are puzzle games, which are generally enjoyed but not much talked about.

Luigi

Mario is Missing (SNES, 1993)

Luigi's Mansion (GameCube, 2003)

Mario is Missing is one of the least liked games of all time. It is an edutainment game, but most gamers simply feel it is poorly done. This does not mean they do not want to learn, however. Luigi's Mansion was the one of the first games available for GameCube and, though relatively short, it was quite popular, as it saw Luigi exploring a mansion he won in a contest he didn't enter attempting to suck up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner in his search for the kidnapped Mario. The vacuum cleaner he was given was made by the same man as made Mario's water cannon in Super Mario Sunshine

In Closing

So there you have it - a comprehensive list of all the Mario games in their various styles. If you now go out and buy one, you will probably enjoy it - after all, almost everyone else does. Just ignore those who say that the Mario games are for kids - they literally don't know what they're missing. And if you are a kid, playing these will most likely give you a good dose of originality in a sector of the entertainment industry that is rapidly going the way of popular music. Unfortunately, many other games copy elements from Mario, making his games seem less innovative. Oh, well, that's life.