Super Mario Retrospective #0
Ah, Super Mario. The game series starring the cheerful, enthusiastic Italian plumber. What’s not to love?
Mario’s history
For those unfamiliar, the first game Mario ever appeared in was the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong. Back then he was known as “Jumpman”. While Donkey Kong is fun to play for short bursts, and it’s undoubtedly iconic, from a purely gameplay perspective I don’t think it aged all that well. Ironically for his original name being Jumpman, Mario’s jumping skills are far less impressive here than in future games, his movement is slow and stiff in general, and the game only has three or four stages (depending on which version you’re playing), albeit the stages themselves do loop over and get progressively harder as you keep playing.
The game had a sequel, Donkey Kong Jr., which is a little better. It’s noteworthy for being the only video game in which Mario has ever been a villain! An odd little footnote in Mario’s early history that never comes up again. Really, just imagine what it would be like to have a more recent game with Mario as an antagonist. It’s hard to envision, isn’t it?
Both Mario and Donkey Kong would go on to feature in better games and carve out their own identities separate from each other. For Donkey Kong, he found his footing starting with the Donkey Kong Country games. That’s a great series too. I might give that its own retrospective sometime.
As for Mario, his blossoming came with Super Mario Bros. on the NES in 1985. Although Mario had appeared in a few other games in-between this and Donkey Kong, this was the first “Super Mario” game, which spawned many sequels, which are the games I will be talking about within this retrospective.
My history
Mario and I go way back. I’ve been playing Mario games since early childhood. The first ones I owned were Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars, the latter being a compilation and graphical remaster of the first four games in the series.
This was (and still is) a fantastic set of games. They were my jam growing up. Many happy memories playing them in the basement of my parents’ old house. There was a later version of Super Mario All-Stars released which included Super Mario World in the same bundle.
But I never owned that one, as I had Super Mario World on a separate cartridge from the others.
Many of the later games in the series also bring back memories from various points throughout my life. Super Mario 64 DS, for example. To help paint a picture, I live in a region with lots of vast plains. Many of my extended family live in a much more mountainous area, a roughly nine hours’ drive from where I live. It was a tradition for myself and my mother and brother to go on vacation to visit the rest of our family. At least once a year, the three of us would head out there. It was a long drive through the mountains to get there, but I loved it. The long drive was as much a part of our annual vacation as the rest of the trip was.
Once we arrived, we’d stay at my grandparents’ house. And I mention this because I can distinctly recall one afternoon, playing Super Mario 64 DS on my handheld while lying on my grandparents’ living room couch. To this day, playing the game again still brings back nice memories of my grandparents and their cozy home.
Other Mario games bring back memories of where I was living at the time. I can remember playing New Super Mario Bros. for DS in my bedroom at my dad’s house before I moved out a few years later. Once I had moved out, I can remember playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii when I lived in the basement of this schoolteacher’s house. By the time of New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U a few years after that, I had since moved into my own apartment.
New Super Mario Bros. 2 also brings back memories of, again, the long drive through the mountains to visit my relatives, as it was in the car on another one of our vacations there when I was playing the game for the very first time.
“How many Super Mario games are there?”
It’s a simple question that sounds like it should have a simple answer, but the answer is in fact surprisingly complicated.
To clarify, I’m talking about the ‘core’ or ‘mainline’ Mario games. If you look at the entire franchise, there are a lot of different sub-series, many of which tackle different genres; puzzle games, racing and sports games, role-playing games, party games, etc. However, the ‘platformer’ games are the ones I’ll be covering, as they are the ones I am the most fond of, and are the ones which make up the core Mario series.
But even if you only count the main platformers, exactly how many there are is still a bit of a murky issue. While some of the games are near-unanimously counted as being part of the same series, others straddle the line. Some people do count certain games, some people don’t, and different people have different reasons for why they do or don’t count certain titles. Even the official sources from Nintendo themselves have given contradictory answers.
If you’re curious to know more about the distinctions and just how nuanced it gets, I would highly recommend checking out this fantastic video from YouTuber ‘jan Misali’ where he tackles this very question:
As for my own personal list, I would say there are twenty of them total:
1. Super Mario Bros.
2. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels
3. Super Mario Bros. 2
4. Super Mario Bros. 3
5. Super Mario Land
6. Super Mario World
7. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
8. Super Mario 64
9. Super Mario Sunshine
10. New Super Mario Bros.
11. Super Mario Galaxy
12. New Super Mario Bros. Wii
13. Super Mario Galaxy 2
14. Super Mario 3D Land
15. New Super Mario Bros. 2
16. New Super Mario Bros. U
17. New Super Luigi U
18. Super Mario 3D World
19. Super Mario Odyssey
20. Bowser’s Fury
In jan Misali’s video, he gives a list of eighteen games, which includes everything above except for New Super Luigi U and Bowser’s Fury. His argument being that New Super Luigi U is an expansion pack of New Super Mario Bros. U rather than a full game in and of itself, and Bowser’s Fury is likewise an expansion of Super Mario 3D World. However, I feel that New Super Luigi U and Bowser’s Fury have just enough in them to be counted as their own separate games and thus I will be reviewing them as such.
We were treated to Bowser’s Fury only a year and a half ago. But prior to that, the last full game in the series was Super Mario Odyssey back in 2017. It’s been quite a long wait for the next Mario game, and for the past several months now I have been anxiously awaiting any sort of announcement about what it will be. But in the meantime, I decided this would be a good opportunity to play through the rest of the games again. See you all next time for my review of the original Super Mario Bros.