Mario (franchise)
media franchise
Mario is a Japanese media franchise created by Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto for the video game company Nintendo. Starring Mario, the franchise began as a video game and has extended to other forms of media, including a television series, comic books, the films Super Mario Bros. (1993), The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026), and the theme park area Super Nintendo World. Mario made his first video game appearance in the arcade game Donkey Kong (1981) and was featured in multiple Donkey Kong games prior to Mario Bros. (1983), the first game with "Mario" in the title. Mario video games have been developed by a variety of developers, with the vast majority produced and published by Nintendo and released on Nintendo's video game consoles.
The flagship Mario subseries is the Super Mario series of platform games starting with 1985's Super Mario Bros., which mostly follows Mario's adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom and typically relies on Mario's jumping ability to allow him to progress through levels. The franchise has spawned over 200 games of various genres and several subseries, including Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Paper Mario, and Mario & Luigi; several characters introduced in the Mario franchise, such as Luigi, Wario, and Yoshi, sparked successful franchises of their own.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mario (franchise)” as media franchise. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as media franchise. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4803535. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1993, 2023, 2026 and 1981.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mario (franchise)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.