is-wonder-mainline-yet - Tumblr blog

is-wonder-mainline-yet · 2 months ago

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A certain paragraph caught my attention in the recent Super Mario edition of TIME Magazine:

Considering game sales alone, the Mario video game franchise has sold more than 900 million units worldwide across more than 200 games, making it the best-selling video game franchise of all time. The primary Super Mario series has sold more than 495 million copies worldwide.

The article (Still Super After All These Years, by Courtney Mifsud Intreglia) clearly distinguishes the sales of the Mario video game franchise and the primary Super Mario series. And since an actual number was provided, this implies it's based on some list of games. Where did this number come from? Did the author source it from somewhere, or does TIME keep an official list of mainline Super Mario games? It's likely the former from what I've found, but the probable source does have some interesting inclusions! (Long post below the fold.)

The source

I'm pretty sure this number comes from the Video Game Sales Fandom Wiki page for Mario:

This wiki does provide a list of sources, in the form of a table totalling to 497,719,019 unit sales. Where this is the top result when Googling "Super Mario series sales" I have little doubt this is the source of the TIME article's claim. (To cover my bases, I confirmed that the summary text in the wiki was updated in August 2024, so it pre-dates the TIME article's release in March 2025.)

So, what games does this wiki article include as part of the mainline Super Mario series? Full list incoming, followed by some inclusions I find notable:

The list

Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)

Super Mario Bros. (Game & Watch, 1986)

VS. Super Mario Bros. / VS. Mario's Adventure (Arcade, 1986)

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES / Wii, 1993)

Super Mario Bros. DX (GBC, 1999)

Classic NES Series: Super Mario Bros. (GBA, 2004)

Super Mario Bros. (Wii (VC), 2006)

Super Mario Bros. (NES Classic Edition, 2016)

Super Mario Bros. 2 / The Lost Levels (FDS, 1986)

Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic (FDS, 1987)

Super Mario Bros. 2 / Super Mario USA (NES, 1988)

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES / Wii, 1993)

Super Mario Bros. DX (GBC, 1999)

Super Mario Advance (GBA, 2001)

Famicom Mini Series: Super Mario Bros. 2 (GBA , 2004)

Super Mario Bros. 2 (NES Classic Edition, 2016)

Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES, 1988)

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES / Wii , 1993)

Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (GBA , 2003)

Super Mario Bros. 3 (Wii (VC) , 2007)

Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES Classic Edition, 2016)

Super Mario Land (GB, 1989)

Super Mario Land (3DS (VC), 2011)

Super Mario World (SNES, 1990)

Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA, 2001)

Super Mario World (Wii (VC) , 2006)

Super Mario World (Super Mario All-Stars: 25th Anniversary Edition) (Wii, 2010)

Super Mario World (SNES Classic Edition, 2017)

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (GB, 1992)

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (GB, 1994)

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES, 1993)

Super Mario All-Stars: 25th Anniversary Edition (Wii, 2010)

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES, 1995)

Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island (GBA, 2002)

Super Mario 64 (N64, 1996)

Super Mario 64 DS (NDS, 2004)

Super Mario 64 (Wii (VC), 2006)

Super Mario 64 (Super Mario 3D All-Stars) (Switch, 2020)

Super Mario Sunshine (GCN, 2002)

Super Mario Sunshine (Super Mario 3D All-Stars) (Switch, 2020)

New Super Mario Bros. (NDS, 2006)

New Super Mario Bros. 2 (3DS, 2012)

Super Mario Galaxy (Wii, 2007)

Super Mario Galaxy (Super Mario 3D All-Stars) (Switch, 2020)

New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii, 2009)

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, 2010)

Super Mario 3D Land (3DS, 2011)

New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U, 2012)

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (Switch, 2019)

New Super Luigi U (Wii U, 2013)

Super Mario 3D World (Wii U, 2013)

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury (Switch, 2021)

Super Mario Maker (Wii U, 2015)

Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS (3DS, 2016)

Super Mario Run (Mobile, 2016)

Super Mario Odyssey (Switch, 2017)

Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch, 2019)

Super Mario 3D All-Stars (Switch, 2020)

Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch, 2023)

how many Super Mario games are there (according to this specific wiki article)?

While each game is listed in its own line in the table, this doesn't necessarily mean the wiki is suggesting there are 59 distinct Super Mario games. The table groups reissues into 20 categories, which seems reasonable given that the goal is to count sales of specific versions. So, is it saying there are exactly 20 games? ...probably not.

It doesn't seem like every category is meant to represent a distinct game. (Why are Super Mario Lands 2 and 3 in the same category, but Super Mario Land is in its own category?) In any case, the final category includes the last 5 games on the above list. I really doubt anyone seriously thinks Super Mario Run and Super Mario Odyssey are the same game, and that both are reissues of a game called "Later games"

So, still no idea. Probably more than 20.

Notable inclusions and exclusions

The second item on the list, in the same category as Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985) is Super Mario Bros (Game & Watch, 1986). Guess it's mainline after all!

Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. (2020) is not included, though, nor is the Super Mario Bros. Nelsonic Game Watch (1989).

This list includes Doki Doki Panic as its own game in the Super Mario Bros. 2 category. That's pretty fun.

Both Wario Land and Yoshi's Island are in there, though not any of the sequels in their respective sub-series.

New Super Mario Bros. U, U Deluxe, and New Super Luigi U are all included, but not New Super Mario Bros. U + New Super Luigi U.

Looking through the edit history it appears that Super Mario Bros. Wonder was added to the list of mainline games on June 25, 2023, 117 days before it was released. (No sales data at that time, of course.) Fandom user MarioFanYT is more on the ball than whoever runs the official Mario website

Wait, why are there multiples of some games?

You might have noticed that some games are counted more than once in the above list. Super Mario 3D All-Stars shows up 4 times! This happens because the table places compilations of games into the categories for each game it contains, as well as in its own category. So 3D All-Stars is counted as part of the subtotals for Super Mario 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, and in its own row. Other compilations work similarly.

It seems weird to count each sale of 3D All-Stars as four separate game sales, but maybe the wiki accounts for that in the total. If that were the case, you'd expect the Grand Total to be less than the sum of the separate subtotals, and that is indeed the case.

Sum of subtotals: 515,759,019

Grand Total: 497,719,019

It looked like it might be removing the duplicates, but after looking at it myself in a spreadsheet I get a value of 438,669,019 sales when duplicates are removed. Digging a little deeper, I found a mistake in the wiki's subtotal for Super Mario 3D World, which sums the Wii U game's 5,880,000 with the Switch's 13,470,000 to get only 19,050,000, which loses 300k sales somewhere. This still doesn't account for the difference in my results, but suggests there may be other errors in the wiki's.

It's possible I've made a mistake somewhere, but I haven't been able to get that 497.7 million count with any changes to what I do or don't count as a duplicate.

Conclusions?

This post was originally going to be just a screenshot of the magazine article and a little blurb like "I wonder what games TIME Magazine considers to be mainline?" It's ballooned out from there a little bit. I'm not sure if there's any real conclusions to be drawn.

Should Courtney Mifsud Intreglia have put the same work into fact-checking that "495 million sales" number that I did, correcting it to "over 438 million"? Uh, no, definitely not. The rest of her article is a broad overview of Mario's cultural impact, and the precise sales figure is not relevant to the article's point. Besides, the idea of trying to define how many mainline Mario games have been sold requires defining how many mainline Mario games exist (which is senseless, 'cause there's no consensus) so any number in the article would have been subject to interpretation.

Do I have some call-to-action for the Video Game Sales Wiki? Not really. In general, I am not very invested in the accurate reporting of video game sales on a Fandom wiki. Maybe I'll edit the page myself if I still care by tomorrow. (By the way, the Super Mario Wiki article on Super Mario (franchise) cites a 330 million unit sales figure, but that's from a 2015 blog post by Nintendo so it would be out of date in 2025.)

Mostly, I'm just trying to document the rabbit hole I've been falling down for the last 5 hours or so today, and this blog seems like a good place to put it. I've been thinking of making more posts documenting "in the wild" lists of mainline Super Mario games, but it'll depend on whether there's enough out there that I find interesting enough to post. In any case, I probably won't be making many more posts of this length - sorry if you only followed for the daily timeline posts and weren't expecting a wall of text!

For anyone who's read the whole thing (or even skimmed it), I hope you enjoyed it at least partly as much as I had fun putting it together!

#not timeline #long post #unofficial mainline lists

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is-wonder-mainline-yet · 3 months ago

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Yep, still there (May 17, 2025)

After 573 days of no updates to the Mario history timeline, Super Mario Bros. Wonder has been added to the website on day 574. This puts it in 2nd place behind New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, which was added on day 602 after its launch. But why now?

I didn't do any documentation of the rest of Mario Dot Nintendo Dot Com, but luckily the most recent archive on the Wayback Machine is on May 8th, 2025. The first thing I noticed is that the Characters page has been updated with new renders. Check out that denim on the Super Mario Brothers!

Notably, the new Kong designs are also present, including the new Diddy Kong render shown off on the very same day the website was updated, May 15:

In fact, renders all across the website have been updated! Basically every appearance of Mario has that detailed moustache and those shiny metal buttons on his overalls (though some characters have had only subtler lighting changes, or even none I can distinguish). Since most of the poses are near-identical, it makes a great comparison.

It seems like they did a site-wide update to prepare for the Switch 2 launch, showing off the redesigns. One of those updated Mario renders appears on the Mario history page, so with that in mind it's not surprising that the timeline was updated along with it.

With that, I've said all I really wanted to say on the subject. Sorry to the 5 followers I've gained since making the "Yes" post, but I don't really think I'll be doing much with this blog in the near future. Maybe I'll post some jokes?

And of course, special thanks to jan Misali for creating the how many Super Mario games are there NOW? video that brought my attention to the website in the first place. (and for all their other great videos!)

#mario dot nintendo dot com slash history #The idea of continuing to post “yes it's still there” did cross my mind #but I think the joke would stop being funny to me pretty quickly

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is-wonder-mainline-yet · 3 months ago

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