After a long time of relying on just their established franchises, Nintendo has recently started experimenting with creating new IPs, to great success- but the mascot of Nintendo, the face of video games, still remains Mario, who celebrated his thirtieth anniversary last month, marked by the release of the excellent Super Mario Maker.
Going forward, Nintendo is releasing their mysterious Nintendo NX system some time next year- and Mario’s creators hope that Mario will continue being the face of Nintendo with the NX and beyond.
“That Mario has been loved so much up to this point is nothing short of miraculous, although obviously this is in part the result of the untold work of multitudes of people, not limited to just the developers at Nintendo,”Nintendo developer Takashi Tezuka, and the director of the Mario franchise, said to GamesMaster. “It’s impossible for me to imagine what Mario will go on to become in the future, so I am very excited to find out. However, I do hope that even after 30 more years, Mario continues to be Nintendo’s lead videogame character.”
Mario has shown unusual resilience- no other games franchise has lasted this long, and a lot of this has to do with the consistently high quality Mario games that Nintendo puts out. As long as the quality of Mario’s headlining adventures does not decline, Mario will continue to be the face of not just Nintendo, but of gaming as a whole.