Super Mario (franchise)

The Mario series is a long-running video game series published by the popular 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 created by Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario is the main protagonist throughout most of the series; the main antagonist of the series is Bowser, the King 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.

Movie
The Super Mario Bros. film was a movie that was loosely based on the Super Mario Bros. series of video games; it was released in 1993. The movie is often considered to be very poor. The estimated production of the film was $42 million; however, the gross revenue wasn't even $21 million &mdash; thus, the movie took a huge financial loss. The movie starred Bob Hoskins, (as Mario), John Leguizamo, (as Luigi), and Dennis Hopper, (as King Koopa). In the movie, Mario and Luigi must rescue Daisy, the princess of Dinohatten, from King Koopa's cousins &mdash; Spike and Iggy.

Comics
Club Nintendo is the German equivalent of Nintendo Power; it is a series of magazines dedicated to everything Nintendo-related. However, Club Nintendo had a unique feature: every other month, a comic was published by Club Nintendo, generally featuring Mario-related characters and species. The first comic issue debuted in April of 1991. Over a span of eight years, Club Nintendo released a total of 37 comics that were based around the Mario series.

Critical Reception
The Mario series is the largest video game franchise in existence, and has had a lifespan of almost thirty years. It is often considered to be the greatest video game series of all time, receiving many high-scoring reviews on their various games. In the series, many games have been considered to be the best of their time by players. However, the series has been considered to have some games of lower quality. An example is the Mario Party sub-series; after the release of Mario Party 2, the series is considered to have lost its flair, as the games often contain the same mechanics. Super Mario Bros. was declared to be the greatest video game of all time twice: once by IGN in 2003, and the other time by GamesRadar in 2000.