Join The Community
We've written a hell of a lot of features about Mario over the years. A hell of a lot. Some of them have been reverent, some of them have been subversive, and some of them have been flat-out weird. All of them though, have been brilliant, in their own special little ways. If I sound like a proud parent saying nice things to each of his variously odd kids, that's because a week like Super Mario Week, packed as it has been with new Mario features, gets you nostalgic for all the old ones. So I've put together this compendium page detailing and linking back to all of our best ones since 2007.
Have a plough through. See if you missed any. And if you're new to the site, hoover up the lot of them. It'll be a bulky meal, and it might make you feel a bit sick at times, but I assure you it will be ultimately both nourishing and rewarding.
Unknown Mario: 30 obscure facts and random trivia about Nintendo's mascot
In which Henry burrows beneath the very fabric of the universe to bring you mind-blowing Mario facts so unknown that to know them automatically makes you the most evolved being on the planet. Until everyone reads them and... Oh...
Video: Super Mario Bros. - The miserable life of a Goomba
In which Justin unearths long-hidden documentary footage detailing just how soul-suckingly miserable the life of a Goomba is outside his brief moments of on-screen glory.
Why every Mario game is the best AND the worst in the series
Long-standing fanboy fights simultaneously neutralised and inflamed. Which actually takes quite a lot of skill, and is rather a large achievement when you think about it.
8 reasons why Bowser always fails
Should be fairly self-explanatory, this one. Basically, Cundy gets underneath Bowser's long-standing anti-Mario strategies and works out why he always fails, concluding upon eight main reasons.
10 merciless Mario re-imaginings
There are few things the internet loves more than warping childhood innocence by reworking it beyond all belief into a darker, far weirder, deconstructed context. Porn and cats. And complaining. Those are about the only things the internet likes more.
The sexual politics of the Mushroom Kingdom
In which I draft an incredibly deep, dark, and oft emotionally harrowing psychological dissection of the various relationships, inter-personal subtexts, and psycho-sexual dysfunctions at play between the various Mario cast members across the breadth of the series and its spin-offs.
The many faces of Mario
Mario hasn't always looked like he does now. In fact at times his design has been flat-out weird. In fact, at times he's alternately looked like James Bond, a mulleted Spanish superhero on an acid hallucination, and a real guy in dungarees and a baseball cap. And far weirder. We have proof.
Video: What Super Mario Bros. would look like with guns
Justin decides to make an old and thankfully long-forgotten Shigeru Miyamoto prototype idea real. We don't know why. We couldn't stop him.
What if Mario wasn't the famous brother?
Things could have been so different for Luigi if he'd become the dominant brother. All of this could have happened. It would have been amazing for him, and video games would have been completely different. But none of this happened, so a lot of people think he's just crap and a bit weird. Shame.
10 things you didn't know about Super Mario Bros. 2
Yeah we know you know it's a reskinned port of a Japanese NES game. Don't patronise us by thinking we'd patronise you with that. We're talking about far cooler, far more interesting things that you really didn't know.
The 24 greatest Mario commercials of all time
There have been many Mario games. And they have sold well, partly because many of them have had brilliant adverts. But no adverts as great as these 24. Apart from these 24.
5 reasons to hate Mario
Yeah, he is a bit of a dick, isn't he?
Super Mario Bros. 3 20 years later
Henry gets all retrospective and analytical, and probably a bit misty-eyed at times too. But still, history! Significance! Gravitas! Science! But not so much science really...
Are old-school Sonic and Mario really that good?
I replay the best 16-bit entries in each series (Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog 2) and give them both a thoroughly objective re-reviewing, nostalgia thrown out of the window. Is either of them really as good as we thought they were? Both of them maybe? Neither? Stop asking questions and click the link and I'll tell you.
Luigi: A life in the shadows
You know when I was talking about how Luigi's life could have gone, just up the page? Well this is how it did go. He'll never be a superstar, but it's maybe not as bad as you think.
Which real-life moustachioed man looks most like Mario?
This is a deeply important question, and Cundy has tackled it with all of the seriousness such a question requires. 20 real men with real moustaches, 20 scientifically precise aesthetic analyses. And only one ultimate looking-like-Mario winner.
Which version of Mario is the best version of Mario?
Nearly 70 different Mario sprites and character models compared, and then thrown into a battle to the death to compete for the title of best Mario ever. Or, you know, written about in an article until we picked a winner. The really crap ones do get brutally laughed at though. And that's a sort of death. A death of the soul.
Mario's endless supply of costumes
Okay, so this article is contained within finite space on the web, so is not exactly endless. But Mario is still getting new costumes in new games, so his supply is endless, even if this particular cataloguing of them isn't. Yeah, we're going to win on pedantry. Anyway, there are loads more here than you remember, we almost guarantee it.
The ever-changing sizes of Mario and Bowser
Sometimes Bowser fits in a go-kart. Sometimes he is the size of a street. Sometimes he is somewhere in between. What the actual hell?
The Top 7... Mario spin-offs
There are so many Mario games that a lot of them aren't even really Mario games. These are the 7 best of those Mario games that are not really.
100 deaths of Mario
A loveable plumber being brutally destroyed in 100 different ways, of varying degrees of creativity and personal anguish, Who doesn't want to see that? Not you, certainly.
