Super Mario (franchise)



The Mario series is a long-running video game series published by the enormous gaming company, Nintendo. The Mario series has been running for more than a quarter of a century, and in its lifespan has released more than two-hundred video games. . The series started out in 1981, with the arcade video game, Donkey Kong, and has since then took off into it's own huge franchise. Originally called "Jumpman", Mario &mdash; originally created by Shigeru Miyamoto &mdash; is the main protagonist throughout most of the series; the main antagonist of the series is Bowser, the of all Koopas. The Mario series has contained many different genres of games, from platformers to role-playing games, and from puzzle games to party games. The Mario series has been released on all sorts of systems, including home consoles, handheld game systems, and even personal and Macintosh computers. Originally starting out with an 8-Bit game, the Mario series has gone through many graphical changes throughout the years. The series has spawned numerous sub-series, including the Mario Kart and Mario Party series; it has also taken a large part in the storyline to it's partner series, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and Wario.