Case Study - Mario (4th Draft)

Case Study – Mario (4th Draft)

Picture this year: 1981, is where everything began with the game, Donkey Kong. The storyline goes like this: Jumpman (now named Mario) gets himself into a heap of trouble when his pet ape gets sick of being mistreated and flees, making off with his girlfriend known as the Lady (now called Pauline). It's all up to Jumpman to free the Lady from Donkey Kong's hairy clutches. This game is now ported to fourteen consoles, including the Nintendo Entertainment System. The title, "Donkey Kong", is derived from King Kong and when Shigeru looked up the word "stubborn" in a Japanese-English dictionary.  

It may be hard to believe but Popeye inspired the Mario series. Back in 1981, the game is originally based on Popeye where the player embarks on a rescue mission to save Olive Oyl from Brutus. When the Popeye license fell through, Shigeru changed the main characters. Brutus became an ape, Olive has been replaced by a blonde woman known as the Lady and Shigeru created a short carpenter who is clothed in a blue shirt and red overalls as well as naming him Jumpman. Years later, the Lady has been renamed Pauline and Jumpman has been renamed as Mario.

It appears that simplistic, pixelated game characters are immensely popular and Mario is no exception. In fact due to his super long history, his games are incredibly more famous than recent games and he gained trillions of fans throughout the years along with celebrity fans too such as Girls Aloud, The Saturdays and One Direction. The franchise started off as simple animation back in 1981 and when Super Mario 64 is released for the Nintendo 64 in 1996, which is when the games switch from 2-dimensional animation to 3-dimensional animation. As for the target audience, it's aimed mainly at everyone.

Ever since his debut, he has pioneered gaming like for example; Super Mario 64 is the first game in the game industry to be 3-dimensional, to provide voices for the characters and to possess a groundbreaking control system which is known as the analog control stick. Another example is Donkey Kong when it is the first game to contain the typical running, jumping and collecting important items template. Bottom line, Super Mario Bros. has redefined the platform genre, Super Mario 64 introduced a new dimension and Super Mario Galaxy proved that it's an adventure that is out of this world.

As the years sped by, Mario games are being released one after the other right up until 2012 and many years to come. Speaking of this year, the latest games are Paper Mario: Sticker Star, the newest instalment in the Paper Mario series, and New Super Mario Bros. U, the brand-new game in the Super Mario Bros. series. As long as Nintendo doesn't go bankrupt and the franchise still sticks to the old-school gameplay, elements and storyline, Mario will never fail to amaze the fans worldwide. Of course, it's so obvious that the gamers is used to saving Peach nowadays.