I promise this is still an interesting question

June 6, 2024 7:46 AM

After previously spending over an hour asking and answering the question of how many Super Mario games there are, jan misali is following up with a new too-long video asking how many Super Mario games are there NOW?
posted by Dysk (18 comments total)

Correction: over three-quarters of an hour previously. Made up for by this one being over two hours long(!)
posted by Dysk at 7:47 AM on June 6

Do rereleases and remasters add to the total? Is Super Mario All-Stars one game or four?
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:25 AM on June 6

Of course, this count does not include the many, many fine ROMhacks of Super Mario World that have been made by fans through the years, nor the recently released Mario Builder 64, another fan-made project that came out last month.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:25 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

I'd like to see the age breakdown between who considers Super Mario Bros. 2 a mainline game and who doesn't.

If you were a kid outside of Japan in 1988, you know in your heart that it is a mainline game.

Super Mario World 2 is also a damn good Mario game. I recently played through a big chunk of it for the first time, and if you can get past the emotional trauma of baby mario crying every time you get hit, it's easily a top-ten release.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:32 AM on June 6 [2 favorites]

I was being shortsighted. Super Mario Bros. 2 is still a mainline Mario game if you were a kid in Japan in 1988. It is the quantum superposition of Mario games.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:56 AM on June 6

Many different people have investigated this. Answers range from 200-300 games. You're welcome

That is not at all the answer the video has (it's in the first few minutes of video, and it's "about 18. It's complicated") because it appears to be answering a very different question to what the video is getting at.
posted by Dysk at 9:04 AM on June 6

I thought 1.
posted by Czjewel at 9:17 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

The answer is clearly "not enough."
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:27 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Because the video is 2 hours long, I have written a detailed summary. I hope this helps you figure out whether you personally should watch it.

These is no one answer to the question of the title given in the video. I have included here some of the key groups of games discussed in the video, in the hopes that we can have an argument about the actual data from the video, instead of making up what we think is probably in the video and than having an argument about that.

The video is reporting on the results of a survey that jan Misali ran over most of the last year. In the survey, he asked about all games that were listed (at the time) on the Super Mario wiki, which is more than 300 games. Respondents were asked to classify each game in two ways:

Question 1: 
Is this game:
  a) a Mainline Super Mario Game
  b) a major spinoff
  c) a minor spinoff
  d) non-canon
  e) not a Mario game
  f) unsure

Question 2:
Is this game a distinct entry in the Super Mario series?
  a) yes
  b) no
  c) unsure

The bulk of the video is spent discussing various patterns in the cross-tabs of this data. Basically whatever jan Misali thought was interesting. He considers a "Mainline inclusion rate" which is the percent of respondents who called the game both a mainline Super Mario Game *and* a distinct entry in the Super Mario series.

Out of all 300+ games, there are distinctly 19 games which have consensus by this metric. They are discussed starting around here, and you can go there to see the full cross-tabs for each.

Those 19 games are:

Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (NES, 1986)
Super Mario USA (NES, 1988)
Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES, 1988)
Super Mario Land (Game Boy, 1989)
Super Mario World (SNES, 1990)
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy, 1992)
Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64, 1996)
Super Mario Sunshine (Gamecube, 2002)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS, 2006)
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii, 2007)
New Super Maio Bros. Wii (Wii, 2009)
Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, 2010)
Super Maio 3D Land (3DS, 2011)
New Super Mario Bros. 2 (3DS, 2012)
New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U, 2012)
Super Mario 3D Wold (Wii U, 2013)
Super Mario Odyssey (Switch, 2017)
Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch, 2023)

He presents a bar chart of the mainline inclusion rate for all games in the survey starting around here.

In the fourth chapter (beginning around here), he discusses outliers. He presents a scatter chart with question 1 "Mainline" on the y axis and question 2 "Yes it's distinct" on the x axis. At this point, several distinct groupings are discussed.

In the top right, high mainline and high distinct are the 19 consensus games. They're a very clear group, well isolated from everything else. He notes that the "Lands" and New Super Mario Bros. U are slightly separated from the other 16 games.

There is a cluster of three games which are high Mainline, but only medium distinct. These are remakes of games with notable changes in content, making their status ambiguous. Those are:

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury (Switch, 2021)
New Super Luigi U (Wii U, 2013)
Super Mario 64 DS (DS, 2004)


Moving left from there, a cluster of games with a high mainline ranking, but low distinct ranking. These are various re-releases of mainline games:

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES, 1993)
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (GBC, 1999)
Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 (GBA, 2001)
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (GBA, 2003)
Super Mario Advance (GBA, 2001)
Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World (SNES, 1994)
Super Mario 3D All-Stars (Switch 2020)
Super Mario All-Stars Limited Edition (Wii, 2010)
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (Switch, 2019)
Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. (Game & Watch, 2020)



There is a large mass of games pinned against the bottom (very low mainline ranking) and spanning a range of "distinct" from about 5% to about 25%. These are not discussed, but rising above that mass of non-mario games is a collection of games that jan Misali calls "some of the weirdest games". These have low but notably non-zero "mainline" ratings, and low to medium "distinct" ratings. Those games are:

BS Super Mario Collection (SNES, 1997-1998)
All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1986)
BS Super Mario USA (SNES, 1996)
Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3 (GBA, 2002)
VB Mario Land (Virtual Boy, canceled)
Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS (3DS, 2016)
VS. Super Mario Bros. (Arcade, 1986)
Super Mario Bros. (Game & Watch, 1986)
Super Mario Bros. Special (NEC PC-8801, 1986)
Super Mario Bros. 64 2 (Nintendo 64, canceled)
Super Mario Bros. 35 (Switch, 2020)


Finally there is a cluster of games with low "mainline" ratings but medium "distinct" ratings. These games are visually clustered and clearly isolated from the others. These are games of controversial status. Jan Misali notes that these games are each listed as part of the series by some fan wikis but not others, with no consistency for the games as a group. He states:

[T]he type of ambiguity these games have is in a sense more substanial than the other ambiguous games I've mentioned. These aren't just controversial among fans in general; these games are controversial among the type of fans who write the wiki articles that other fans get their lists of games from.

These games are:

Donkey Kong (Arcade, 1981)
Mario Bros. (Arcade, 1983)
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES, 1995)
Super Mario RPG: Legedend of the Seven Stars (SNES, 1996)
Super Mario Maker (Wii U, 2015)
Super Mario Run (iOS, 2016)
Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch, 2019)


Much of the rest of the video is spent examining they ways that people *talk* about the Super Mario series, and how that compares to what they actually think is on the list. Various metrics have been put forth publicly or in the responses to his survey which purport to give a rule-based, "objective" method of determining if a game is "part of the Super Mario series". Jan Misali analyzes these in light of the data collected, and notes what underlying unstated assumptions are necessary to make these metrics work in the face of the extremely messy realities.

Throughout the entire video, I would say that jan Misali has a particular interest in grey areas, ambiguities, and cognitive biases. He is meticulous and detail-oriented, thorough in his analysis, which generates the long length of the video. The presentation moves quickly: the video is long but there are a large number of things that he wants to talk about, and the editing never drags. I should say, I think you'd only find it to drag if you were uninterested in the point he's making at the time. I found the entire thing to be interesting and worth watching.

Also worth noting is a discussion of the game I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater. Jan Misali has some fun with that particular oddball.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:06 AM on June 6 [13 favorites]

A related question is: What games are part of the "3D Mario" series? This series has a different style of game design than the 2D series, focusing on solving specific "find the star" challenges in free-roaming stages.

Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64, 1996)
Super Mario Sunshine (Gamecube, 2002)
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii, 2007)
Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, 2010)
Super Mario Odyssey (Switch, 2017)
Bowser's Fury (Switch, 2021)

Notably, Super Mario 3D Land/World uses a 3D engine but 2D-style "find treasures on the way to the flag" game design.
posted by Phssthpok at 12:59 PM on June 6

If you too would like to participate in a lengthy Mario survey run by jan Misali, currently running is who are the main characters of Mario?, which asks you to rate 200+ characters on a 1 to 7 scale of "not a main character" to "main character".
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:57 PM on June 6 [2 favorites]

Personally, of the 7 controversial games, I'd put both arcade Mario and Yoshi's Island in the "Mainline" group.

Arcade mario I think people sometimes say it's "Mario" but it's not a "Super Mario" game. The gameplay is pretty different. But I think it's distinctly of the lineage in a way that some of the other proto-mario games aren't, and I'm not really hung up on the "Super" designation one way or the other. I think Donkey Kong (arcade) proto-mario with enough relevance to be interesting, but not enough to include it on the list.

Yoshi's Island gets left off because it's pretty different, and it spawned a whole separate series of Yoshi games. Late in the video jan Misali talks about the need to recognize that there are many "series" at play, and they're not transitive: Super Mario Land 1 and 2 are both part of the consensus "mainline" series, and they are entries in the separate "Super Mario Land" series which also includes Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Pretty much nobody thinks that Wario Land is a mainline mario game, and I suspect its existence is probably partly responsible for the slight separate that Land 1 and 2 show from the rest of the mainline series. Some people aren't comfortable acknowledging a sub-series which isn't either wholly within or wholly outside of the main series.

Similarly, Yoshi's Island can be the second Super Mario World game without being part of the mainline Super Mario series, but I think it should count anyway. The "Super Mario World" series was the premier mario line for the life of the SNES, and I don't hold the fact that the later Yoshi games aren't mainline mario games against it.

I love Super Mario RPG, but I think I'd struggle to come up with reasons to include it on the list.

Maker 1 and 2... I get why someone would include them. They're definitely major mario games, but honestly the thing that makes me pause most isn't even the user-generated content per se but the fact that they're reliant on servers which either have or will eventually shut down. Preservation will occur, but I think their significance will fade over time, and it doesn't make sense to imagine a re-release or re-make of either. That'd just be Mario Maker 3.

People apparently say a lot of really dumb things about Super Mario Run. I liked it fine, but it's too short to count. An interesting off-shoot, but not a mainline game.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:25 PM on June 6

but can anyone do me a solid and just give me a ballpark number?

The point of the video is that there isn't really a ballpark figure
posted by creatrixtiara at 7:50 PM on June 6

Similarly, Yoshi's Island can be the second Super Mario World game without being part of the mainline Super Mario series, but I think it should count anyway. The "Super Mario World" series was the premier mario line for the life of the SNES, and I don't hold the fact that the later Yoshi games aren't mainline mario games against it.

Hard agree, and hard agree with the logic. If a standalone Yoshi's Island series meant that SMW2 can't be part of both it and the Mario series, then the standalone Mario series should mean that Donkey Kong is not part of the Donkey Kong series, and obvious nonsense. Games can be part of more than one series, and series can have partial overlap like a Venn/Euler diagram.


Maker 1 and 2... I get why someone would include them. They're definitely major mario games, but honestly the thing that makes me pause most isn't even the user-generated content per se but the fact that they're reliant on servers which either have or will eventually shut down. Preservation will occur, but I think their significance will fade over time, and it doesn't make sense to imagine a re-release or re-make of either. That'd just be Mario Maker 3.

I would include them, and it's based on what I know about Maker 2: it has a Nintendo-designed single-player level set, like a campaign, which is not tied to the servers. If SMW had had a level editor and way to share levels online, would it stop being a real Mario game once the servers went down? I haven't played Maker 1, but Maker 2 has a pretty full Mario game there as well as the level-building stuff. It's intended to give you ideas about level design, sure, but it is at least as full and big a game in itself as Mario Land 1, for example.
posted by Dysk at 9:40 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Fifteen minutes in and I've only just noticed how the chapters are titled. I am pleased with this video's existence.
posted by dick dale the vampire at 11:27 PM on June 6

This is wild. I feel like I've been watching (really, listening in the background) forever and ... I'm halfway through? I genuinely can't imagine being invested in this in any way, and yet ... it's somewhat entertaining? The connections between various gameplay mechanics and character designs across games is really fun.

And I'm glad he addressed my main concern (that every Youtuber pronounces it "brose" instead of "brothers") early on. It just seems like such an eye-rolling Online Gamer affectation to me, so ... I appreciate addressing it, I guess?

I also love the fun he has with the sweater game. It's soft, you wear it, it's software. Duh.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:20 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]

omg, you can't even insist that a Super Mario game has to be about jumping, because the knitting one lets you knit a jumper
posted by Phssthpok at 1:10 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A couple deleted. Just drop the "too-long" thing please, especially as one of the very first comments. Let people who want to watch and discuss do that.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:03 AM on June 8 [1 favorite]