Mario Roulette

The title screen of Mario Roulette

Mario Roulette (マリオルーレット) is an uncommon Japan-only medal game developed by Nintendo in partnership with Konami (who made the machines) and released in 1991, being one of the first medal games from the Mario franchise. The graphics are based heavily on Super Mario World and the gameplay of the Bonus Game.

Gameplay

The gameplay is basically simple, Mario is the main character that appears throughout the game mounted on Yoshi. After inserting the medals (a kind of currency that is often exchanged for prizes or to play again) out of the game title screen, an instructional video is shown where Mario explains how to play. After this, the game begins. The game consists of a wheel with 8 black squares, showing a icon of an item like the Star or the Fire Flower, turning beside one at the center beside one that is in the center and stopped at first. To make them stop os line, the player must press the only button on the machine. After pressing the button, the icons that were stop spinning around, showing the items that were soteados, and then the icon in the center begins to randomly select the icon that is at the center, and the player must press the button again to stop it. If the player manages to equal that in the third stop icons on the same line or make the central icon for an image that shows Peach, the player wins, show a cutscene with a picture of Mario and the player receive as a prize some medals that vary with the number of icons lined. If player can not align the icons so right, or center stop icon into a picture that shows Bowser, he loses the round.

Then, independent of the player winning or losing, there is shown a cutscene shows Mario mounted on Yoshi traversing a scenario like in the title screen (image above, note that it is similar to the gameplay of Super Mario World) which is a kind of "loading screen". After this cutscene, the game begins again.

Machine Information

The machine measures weighs 40 kg and 450 mm wide, 530 mm deep and 1.285 mm in height. It has a 14 inch color monitor (made by Toshiba), consuming a total of 80W of electricity.

It accepts coins of 10 and 100 yen, and is capable of storing 1000 coins of 100 yen. To illustrate the machine were used some artworks from other Super Mario games as Super Mario Bros. 2. Each machine cost around 320,000 yen.