Nintendo’s flagship gaming series is one with a large number of games. With over 40 years of history, Mario has maintained its reputation as the greatest game series of all time. Given the sheer popularity of the series, it’s only natural to expect many of Mario’s best games to be brought to new platforms to appeal to a wider audience.
Unfortunately, while its popularity continues to grow, many games in the series have fallen by the wayside. With such a large catalogue, it’s almost impossible to give every game a second chance. For one reason or another, these Mario games haven’t had a second chance in the spotlight.
9 Mario and Sonic at the Olympics
At one point, the thought of Mario and Sonic playing side-by-side in the same game was unthinkable, but in 2008, as part of the Beijing Olympics, the two crossed paths for the first time in a collection of sports mini-games.
The game features 24 Olympic mini-games and various characters from the Mario and Sonic series. Mario and Sonic at the Olympics became a series that released a new entry at every Olympics except for the 2018 Winter Games. Although the series has a handful of entries at this point, no game in the series has been re-released in any form, including the original, perhaps due to the timeliness of each entry.
8th Mario Superstar Baseball
In typical Mario Sports fashion, Mario Superstar Baseball is a game that anyone familiar with the sport can understand, but with a Mario twist. Filled to the brim with all sorts of Mario characters, the game is designed in such a way that there is plenty of room for depth and creativity when putting together a team, as some characters have better chemistry with each other on the field than others. Topped with special mechanics like star hits and pitches, this is a very fun baseball game.
While the sequel Mario Super Sluggers was re-released on the Wii U eShop, Mario Superstars Baseball has stayed on the GameCube since its release. While a new Mario Baseball game is a possibility, bringing the classic to modern platforms would be highly desirable.
7 Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix
One of the most bizarre Mario spin-offs of all time, Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix is a DDR home game featuring remixes of Mario music made for the GameCube.
The game plays like any other DDR release, but the novelty of this game doesn’t come from its gameplay; it comes from the cast of Mario dismantling it. The game featured a DDR matte made specifically for the GameCube, and while it’s not an impossibility to create a new DDR for modern platforms, it seems an unlikely consideration for Nintendo to do so just for a re-release of one in the future old game to do.
6 Mario Paint
Along with the Super Nintendo Mouse accessory, Mario Paint was a way for gamers on the Super Nintendo to express their creativity back then. The game consisted of different modes such as B. drawing, creating stamps, animating and above all creating music.
Given that it leverages a very specific accessory for a console released in the early ’90s, it makes sense that Mario Paint never showed up when Nintendo re-releases its Super Nintendo library. Despite this, Mario Paint has remained popular across the internet as people have created many popular remixes using its music tool over the years.
For some reason, Mario Sports games don’t get re-released very often. While Mario Power Tennis has been remastered on the Wii with motion control support, Camelot’s other Mario Sports game on the GameCube has been stuck on the platform since its original release.
No Mario Golf offers as much content as Toadstool Tour, and the gameplay remains the best in the series. While there was a new Mario Golf entry on the Nintendo Switch in the form of Mario Golf: Super Rush, fans of the series still regard Toadstool Tour as the biggest in the series and hope it can one day get another chance to thrive.
4 Mario Party 4-10
Mario Party is one of the most popular spin-offs in the Mario series. While the Nintendo 64 trilogy has been re-released a few times, most of the series has not seen the light of day since its initial release, with every Mario Party console from four to ten stuck on its original hardware.
While not every one of these Mario Party games was a smash hit with fans, some of the best games in the series were released during this time, and the lack of re-releases for these classics is saddening. These games have occasionally been credited in games like Mario Party Superstars and Mario Party The Top 100, but none of them have been remade or ported, leaving some of the best party games of all time unplayable by a larger audience.
3 Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
Paper Mario has become a troubled series over the years. Fans crave a game that captures the magic of the originals, and while Paper Mario has been ported to Nintendo 64 a number of times, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has never had a second chance in the spotlight.
Featuring some of the most memorable characters, stories, and environments in the Mario series, The Thousand-Year Door has become a fan favorite among Mario fans, RPG fans, and other gamers. Not since The Thousand Year Door has a Paper Mario installment followed its traditional RPG style. While returning to this formula would be a dream come true, it would also be fantastic to see this masterpiece on newer platforms.
2 Super Mario 3D land
Most mainline Mario platformers have been remastered or ported in one way or another, but the only one that has never seen a re-release is Super Mario 3D Land. 3D Land was the original killer app for the Nintendo 3DS, giving the system a breath of fresh air after a mostly lackluster first year on the market.
A sequel to 3D Land appeared a few years later with the release of Super Mario 3D World. This sequel greatly expanded on what 3D Land was building and includes all new power-ups, characters, game modes and multiplayer support. 3D World got a new chance on the Switch, with Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, a port of the game with a brand new game alongside it. While 3D World received a fantastic port, 3D Land appears to have been left in the dust, having not been re-released for over a decade since its original launch. We hope that one day it can get a port as incredible as 3D World.
1 Mario Kart Double Dash/Wii/7
Mario Kart is a series that has almost overtaken the mainline platformers at this point. The best-selling game on any Nintendo platform since Wii is a Mario Kart game, and four of the ten best-selling Mario games of all time are Mario Kart games, including the number one. While those kinds of stats would lead you to believe that every Mario Kart would be easily accessible, just under half of all Mario Kart games ever made are stuck on the hardware they were released on.
Mario Kart Double Dash, Mario Kart Wii, and Mario Kart 7 were never released on anything other than the GameCube, Wii, and 3DS, respectively. Each of these games brought something new to the table, as Double Dash allowed players to control two racers, Mario Kart introduced Wii motorcycles to the series, and Mario Kart 7 allowed kart customization for the first time. As much as Mario Kart is a household name, it’s bewildering that these titles haven’t been given another chance, and we can only hope that all Mario Karts will one day be playable on the same platform.
