Mario (1981–)
Mario is (all apologies to Zelda, whose time is coming) the quintessential video game. If you ask a random American who doesn't play many games for their platonic idea of a video game, they will probably describe something with Mario elements: you are a brightly-colored male-bodied cartoon who jumps and runs through a world collecting coins and special objects, jumping on/throwing things at/otherwise defeating your similarly bright enemies, and saving a princess locked in a tower somewhere, all while chipper chiptunes music plays in the background. He jumped onto the scene as a character in Nintendo's Donkey Kong in 1981 and since then there have been literally hundreds of games featuring him, in myriad genres and platforms. Mario has a goofy Italian accent, is constantly good-natured and giggling, and roams around a very friendly world; when you lose, it might be frustrating, but there's never anything gory, scary, or even mildly nasty. Enemies you defeat say things like, "Curse you, Mario! You might have beaten me, but you'll never beat Bowser!" It's very good clean fun.
So the tension mostly comes from completeness (grabbing all the coins, getting all the stars) and twitchiness (stuff that takes practice and instincts and athleticism to do smoothly—time your jump so you hit the rotating platform at the right moment, stuff that lends itself to speed runs). The story in most Mario games is pretty nonexistent (Princess Toadstool/Peach has been captured by Bowser, Mario needs to fight through the levels and eventually fight Bowser to save her), which keeps it flexible enough that the difference between Mario games tends to come from new mechanics, platforms, or genres. Super Mario Bros. (1985) has Mario and his brother Luigi working their way through a horizontally scrolling 2D platformer, whereas Super Mario 64 (1996), whose function was largely to show off the brand new Nintendo 64 console, gives Mario an new 3D world and lots of correspondingly 3D moves. The story and the characters are basically the same, but the experience feels very different. Even a game like Paper Mario (2001), which is explicitly more of a story-based adventure with interrupting real-time battles, doesn't add terribly much in the way of story. Peach is held captive, Mario's gotta come find her.
Super Mario Kart (1992), on the other hand, does away with story almost entirely, in favor of its classic racing game aesthetic. You can actually play as Bowser, or Peach, or other Mario friends, here imagined as a commedia dell'arte-style troupe who sometimes like to blow off steam by driving cars straight into water hazards. Super Smash Bros. (1999) similarly features the whole crowd (including other Nintendo faves like Link from Zelda) getting into 1-on-1 battles that play like a g-rated version of Mortal Kombat (1992). There are famous Mario games on the Nintendo gameboy, sports-based Mario games on the Nintendo Wii, expanded action/adventure games like Super Mario World and Super Mario Galaxy, you get the picture.
I like them ok! Mario (and Nintendo franchises in general) were so ridiculously pivotal for the growth of the gaming industry (to the point where it's utterly impossible to picture the 90's without them) and they understandably provoke a lot of nostalgia for the gamers that played them as kids. Having never played one of these games in the 90's, it's a little hard to appreciate them for how awesome they clearly were at the time, like if you'd never seen a Disney movie until age 30 and then tried to understand what all the fuss was about, without the childhood feels to short-circuit your sentimentality. Knowing a quite limited amount, though, my impressions are colored by (a) approving of the hardcore growth mindset Mario games inculcate—if you don't succeed, try again! It's hard to win but easy to improve bit by bit!—and (b) the goddamn insidious sexism inherent in the way these games were marketed and experienced. There's a reason I didn't play them as a little girl (well, plenty of reasons, some of them non-sexism-based), and playing them as an adult requires that irritating, must-identify-with-man-in-picture-because-woman-is-pathetic mechanic that's legitimately annoying, if not alienating. This is an argument with some holes (I mean, I read Nietzsche as a disaffected teen and was totally capable of overlooking the sexism and all male pronouns for the sake of pretension), but I just hate that a very recently developed art form still managed to treat men as brave adventurers and women as objects/prizes. Come on, team.
