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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.

When Nintendo released Mario Kart 64 in the 1990s, it became one of the most well-known games of the past few decades. During the game, four players race each other on a variety of tracks. Each player could utilize random items on the course to throw at the others. Four different game modes existed, the Time Trial, Versus, Grand Prix and Battle options. With eight different Nintendo characters to choose from, the game revolved around each person’s favorite, including Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Toad, Yoshi, or Bowser. Gamers argued over whether which player was better and who could be the one that excelled over the others.

The game was the second installment of the Mario Kart franchise that began with Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo gaming system. If you grew up in the 1990s, you would probably remember racing your friends in Mario Kart 64. Some would tell you to stop cheating if you looked at their characters’ races in the split screen. Others would keep their mouths shut and attempt to get away with it themselves. Some people always said that Peach or Yoshi were the fastest characters, but you could make the argument for virtually any character as long as you knew how to utilize their strengths.

With the recently unveiled demo of Super Mario Odyssey wowing fans and critics alike, it’s clear that this 36-year old plumber has the capacity to mesmerise global gaming audiences.

Whilst the open-ended universes of No Man’s Sky and the yawn-inducing back stories of Mass Effect: Andromeda continue to underwhelm gamers, it’s clear that for simple retro gaming fun, it’s hard to beat good old Mario.

By now thanks to information on the internet and the fact that Mario is such an old series people know quite a lot about the main man himself and the series so we’ve done our best to come up with 17 fun facts about the Mario series which you actually might not have known. There’s certainly a few that I didn’t know. Enjoy!

 

The Burdeti Duo performs "Super Medley", an arrangement of Super Mario World
for guitar and piano!

Hello! Big update on my latest work, but in order to appreciate how far I’ve
come in only a month, please check out my previous article.

http://www.superluigibros.com/introducing-super-mario-cgi

 

Final Render: ‘Toon’ – relying only on a basic specular reflection to
determine the ‘depth’

Please Note: This is NOT, I repeat NOT a Video Game. This is an animated series
that will, in turn, turn up a lot like the animated Smash 4 trailers, but with
the plot, style and innocence found in memorable titles like Paper Mario or
Super Mario 64.

I grew up with things like the Super Mario Brothers: Super Show, and while it
wasn’t ‘great’ ..like at all. – I still admire the show for it’s impact on me.

 

In the past short weeks, or even days, I’ve gotten a lot done, and have made
great milestones in what may eventually turn up to be my animating career.

I would love to get really in-depth, but the amount of work that goes into
something like this is.. overwhelming. I may make a tutorial on a few elements,
but other than that, it’s really just too much to explain.

Let’s start of with progress on what I teased very briefly in the last article.

 

Mario’s Pad:

I originally was going to simply re-create the entirety of the house from Paper
Mario, and while it maintained some of the style, I used the one from ‘The
Thousand-Year Door’ as a template, and used other renditions from the other
games too.

 

Various inspirations, all obtained via MarioWiki.

The House is far from done, I just a lot of work done on it. I have to find or
paint new textures, and work out how it’ll eventually look complete.

Here’s a comparison between the N64 version and the latest render.

Current-ish progress on the house. Still have a ways to go, as displayed below

 

3D Roofwork Attempt:
Roof tiles.. so annoyingly tedious. Postponing on the house for now. -_-‘

 

 

New zig-zag variant of Mushroom Hills:
​While exploring the files inside of World 7 in NSMBW, I located an alternate
Mushroom Hill pattern seen only in 3d within the sky levels.
-Low resolution 2D sprites are used in World 1 instead, not knowing where they
were, I eventually located them by replaying game levels in coin battle.

 

The Mario fan scene is one of the best of all time for fan games and game
mods. With Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, Psycho Waluigi, Brutal Mario and many more,
there are tons of great projects out there.