If you hunt around YouTube, you will inevitably come across plenty of “competitive” action for Mario games, with users posting clips of themselves finishing levels in world record times and so on. But these clips are usually posted by fanzines or amateur devotees to the games; fun to watch, but not intended to be taken seriously. The videos will often have plenty of hits, tens of thousands, but the following is nevertheless a world away from the following of professional gamers in the world of eSports, an industry with millions of devotees around the world and whose revenue is now measured in billions of dollars.

2019 looks like it’s going to be another year for our friendly plumber and the entire company.  Never content with the endless list of games already released, Nintendo Switch have revealed that there will be not one but two releases next year to look forward to.

The last Super Mario offering, Super Mario Odyssey in 2017 broke the 10 million sold copies mark, making it the fastest-selling title in the US and Europe. This is followed by Mario Kart 8, which sold 9.22 million copies. This last bit of news is highly interesting and relevant here because it just goes to show that spin-offs can be just as popular (if not more in some cases) than some of the main game products.

For longstanding fans of the Mario game universe and its many main titles and spin-offs, the gameplay mechanic of collecting different colored coins will be very familiar to you. They feature in freemium mobile game Super Mario Run as well as recently released Nintendo Switch exclusive Super Mario Odyssey and in tropical adventure game Super Mario Sunshine. 

Coins have actually featured in the series since the very beginning, making their debut as an uncommon item all the way back in 1983’s Mario Bros. Collecting coins isn’t exclusive to games that star Mario and Luigi, it’s actually a fairly common game mechanic. But why exactly is that?

The Japanese gaming giant Nintendo is responsible for some of the most iconic games and characters in history, games that have gone on to influence global culture, media, fashion and music on a scale that no other games have been able to do before or since. You don’t have to be a lifelong Nintendo fan to be able to instantly recognize the cheery chiptune beats of  Mario 64 or the instantly recognizable race course of Mario Kart such as Rainbow Road. Even iconic pioneer games such as Tetris belong under the Nintendo banner.

Part of what makes Nintendo games so successful is their powerful and widely recognizable brand appeal, which is why the iconography of their most beloved games and characters has been replicated across just about every medium you can possibly think of. This happens to also include slot games, which have long been adept at capitalizing on popular existing games to appeal to a wide array of fans worldwide. Nintendo has produced many seriously fun slot machine games of their own over the years. Nintendo-based slot games have earned their way into the annals of the most enduring and endlessly replayable gaming experiences in history. Here are five of the very best.

1. Hot Slots

When choosing the best, it’s right to start at the very beginning. Hot Slots was a 1991 release for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) which allowed the players to enjoy all of the heart-pounding excitement of the slot machine experience from the comfort of their own homes for the first time in history. To begin each game, the player must select one of three slots on offer from a fairly simple (by modern standards) gaming format; “Cutie Bunny”, “Juicy Fruits” or “Las Vegas”, before then going on to rack up medallions with each lucky pull, with the eventual goal of bagging the mega jackpot.

Mario is the biggest selling video game franchise of all time. When he first appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, Nintendo was sceptical about his success, but they soon realized they had a winning formula. It was just a year later that Donkey Kong Junior was released, and soon after that came Mario Bros. By the end of that decade, there were several new Mario games on the market and a variety of characters had been introduced, most of which are still in the games today.

‘Mario vs. Super Luigi’ – JD Hancock via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Mario has also made a guest appearance in other games, such as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, The Legend of Zelda, and NBA Street.