Today is March 10th and that means that today is National Mario Day. So celebrate with a small sampling of some of the best games to feature Mario over the years.
Mario’s first appearance was in 1981 in Donkey Kong. Once again he was looking to save Peach from a giant baddie who never appeared in a game again. Honestly he’s been doing this for over 30 years, at this point maybe he should give up and find a nice woman that’s not going to travel from castle to castle.
Mario’s first official console game came out in 1985 with Super Mario Bros., and it’s been uphill since. He may have started out small but he got big quick. I’m referring to both his games and his stature as he grows pretty quickly in World 1-1, I mean honestly there is a mushroom right there at the beginning.
Mario’s next appearance was as that of the ref in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, which came out in 1987. He’s the perfect ref, if you get out of hand he can just throw a couple fire balls and shut you down pretty quick.
When the Super Nintendo came out Mario needed a game to go along with the new console. To sate our Mario longing we got Super Mario World. It let you have a wide variety of Yoshis, just because one Yoshi isn’t enough.
Two games that got quite a bit of attention, Super Mario Bros. and Tetris, were mashed up into Dr. Mario. It got quite a bit of attention and it is still looked upon fondly to this day. It was much more popular than Hospital Admin Mario which was more about filing than anything else.
Super Mario 64 finally let us do what we’ve wanted to do in all of the other Mario games, jump through paintings. Mario’s disdain for art was finally portrayed in this popular game from 1996.
Released in 2007, Super Mario Galaxy said “Screw You!” to gravity and threw gravity everywhere. There was so much confusion as you jumped on one item and got sucked into the gravitational field of another. It was Nintendo’s way of saying that physics are wrong and should be changed.
New Super Mario Bros. U brought Mario to the Wii U. This game is one great reason to get a Wii U, well, besides the fact that you’d be the one kid on the block with one.
