35 years of Super Mario: five great games to enthrall and entertain
Stepping into the spotlight: Nintendo's intrepid mascot Mario
He doesn't look a day over 30, but middle age is creeping up slowly on videogaming giant Nintendo's moustache-sporting mascot, Mario.
While the Mushroom Kingdom's resident plumber had popped up in Nintendo's early hits, including a turn as the unlikely villain in arcade coin-gobbler , it's arguable that his journey begins in earnest with all-time run-and-jump classic , which hit its 35th anniversary yesterday - releasing on September 13th, 1985, on the company's Famicom system in Japan before a phased worldwide release on its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) counterpart.
While Mario mania engulfed pop-culture as the late eighties wore on, including Saturday morning television shows, a central role in cult-classic kids' film , and a seemingly endless array of merchandise, it's indisputable that Mario has stood the test of time, with a generation of gamers growing up alongside Mario and an ever-expanding cast of friends, allies and enemies.
He's changed with the times, too, and this Friday sees the release of on Nintendo's Switch, a collection of games that are a testament to the evolution of the mainline Mario series, and to games technology in the nineties and noughties: 1996's , 2002's , and 2007's have all been revisited and lovingly remastered.
Slightly after the big day itself, and ahead of an extended season of events and releases across Nintendo's games platforms and other partnerships, here's a look at five reasons to revisit some of Mario's best adventures.
Running from 1985 to 1988, the original . trilogy on the Nintendo Entertainment System set the standard for the platforming genre of videogames, and helped resuscitate an industry that had collapsed under the weight of a sales and marketing goldrush in the early eighties.
It was equally a no-brainer and a masterstroke, then, for Nintendo to bundle them all together for their Super Nintendo in 1993, alongside the original version of that went unreleased in the West for various reasons: with updated visuals and newly-added gameplay elements in each, is still one of the best-value propositions in videogames.
It was also revived on Nintendo's Wii system in 2010 for the original trilogy's 25th anniversary, and has recently been added to the Switch console's Super Nintendo Online games-streaming service.
As the Nineties dawned, and competition began to nip on Nintendo's heels from emerging forces like Sega, Nintendo unveiled their Super Nintendo Entertainment system to great fanfare. While and were perfectly positioned to showcase the hardware's technological advances, Super Mario World was arguably the console's initial 'killer app'.
And while set a precedent for scale, via a world-spanning map that could be traversed in between levels, felt like an odyssey in comparison: branching paths led players to secret areas and special levels, an ever-increasing array of baddies upped the difficulty ante, and the introduction of Yoshi, a cheerful if somewhat nervous dinosaur steed, was a simple but profund addition to the series' side-scrolling gameplay.
With a huge in-game layout that incentivised backtracking and repeated play, added real depth to the series' well-honed formula, and served as an important step forward for Nintendo. You can also find this on the Switch's Super Nintendo service.
While Nintendo's offerings were beginning to feel a little familiar by the late Nineties - opposite Sega's MegaDrive and in the looming shadow of Sony's first PlayStation - the impact of , the launch title for the Nintendo 64 system, is still being felt today.
Taking the Mushroom Kingdom and casting it as a fully-interactive environment, explored in three dimensions with the aid of a player-directed camera, it retains the distinct feel of a development team remaking the long-established rules as they went.
It's easy to take the advances that represented for granted today, as videogames technology continues to accelerate exponentially, and the industry's business model continues to experience growing pains.
Remastered and due for re-release on Nintendo's Switch as part of Friday's 3D All-Stars Collection, Super Mario 64 holds secrets, surprises and the odd belly-laugh for a new generation of players.
While Mario's prinicpal occupations have been rescuing princesses and checking the occasional U-bend, the moustachioed mascot has donned other caps for numerous spin-off series, from busting viruses in puzzler , to competing in the Olympic Games, opposite nineties nemesis Sonic the Hedgehog.
It's the Mario Kart series that is the best-known of his side-hustles, though: the perfect party game, up to four players have been able to split a screen and careen around series-themed tracks and battle-arenas, with various weapons, like missiles and turbo-boosting mushrooms, designed to break up the action and balance its difficulty.
While an argument could be made for being on this list thanks to its astonishing popularity, , first released on Nintendo's ill-fated Wii U, edges it owing to a massive selection of racers from all over the Nintendo canon and beyond, including the surprise appearance of Mercedes Benz cars and 4x4s alongside the series' usual karts, quads and bikes.
Available now as a 'deluxe edition' for Switch, with all of the original's extra content, its online mode also makes for a great loot-free alternative to some of the more money-hungry titles targeting tweens in recent years.
Nintendo's ups and downs as the Nineties gave way to the new millennium are well-documented at this stage, as missteps into a changing market led to the creative and commercial successes of its Wii and DS consoles, and while the Mario series continued to be a stalwart of the company's efforts, it would arguably lapse into relative comfort as the 2010s went on.
In keeping with Nintendo's pattern, though, the company launched its Switch console with a Mario title that brought the series firmly into the present day, doing so in impressive style with the grandiosely-monikered .
Expansive and varied environments make for an immediate but deep sense of exploration; and a new cap-throwing mechanic introduces extended long-jumps, range attacks, and a 'capture' function that allows the player to inhabit enemies' bodies, to sometimes hilarious effect.
And while the series has historically had a propensity for magic moments, Odyssey on several occasions veers into the realm of Spielberg: the game sees you hijacking a literal T-rex to demolish part of a level, a trip to New Donk City culminates in a jazz-laden tribute to the series' history (courtesy of a former damsel-in-distress turned mayor), while the game's final level is a jaw-dropping escalation of the series' ongoing evolution.
If you grew up with a dungaree'd block-basher on your bedroom telly and haven't been back since, it might be time to check this out, especially if the younger players in your life are toting a Switch system in their mitts.
