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Mario's brother finally got top billing—as the nervous lead of Nintendo's GameCube launch. Luigi wins a mansion in a contest he never entered, finds it haunted, loses Mario inside, and armed with a ghost-catching vacuum cleaner, nervously hums his way through rooms of poltergeists. The Poltergust 3000 was ingenious enough to spawn a franchise.
Four players, a board, dice blocks, a minigame at the end of every turn, and a Chance Time space that could swing the whole game on one spin. Mario Party hit the Nintendo 64 in February 1999, spun its analog sticks until kids got blisters, and grew into a series that has sold over 84 million copies and, as the joke goes, ended a few friendships along the way.
The 1992 typing tutor that put Mario in the computer lab: type the letter on the block to smash it, type the word to outswim the fish, type the sentence to outrun the Thwomps. Interplay built it to be the kids' Mavis Beacon, it sold more than 800,000 copies, and its 1993 CD-ROM version was the first time Charles Martinet's Mario voice appeared in a game, on a giant floating head that scared half its students.
The game that showed the world what 3D could be. Super Mario 64 launched the Nintendo 64 by dropping Mario into an open, explorable castle, and its analog-stick control and swooping camera quietly wrote the rulebook every 3D platformer would follow.
What if Mario's Mushroom Kingdom wasn't cheerful, but a dystopian nightmare? Super Mario Bros. (1993) boldly attempted that reimagining, transforming the game's world into Dinohattan—a grimy parallel dimension where dinosaurs had evolved into humanoids. Bob Hoskins played Mario, John Leguizamo his brother Luigi, and the brothers traveled there to rescue Princess Daisy from King Koopa. The film flopped at the box office and earned scathing reviews, but it eventually developed a loyal cult following who celebrate its ambitious practical effects and creature design.
A tropical vacation goes hilariously wrong when Mario arrives on Isle Delfino and is immediately framed for vandalism. Armed with a talking water-cannon backpack and a court order to clean the island, you chased 120 Shine Sprites across a bizarre, sun-soaked adventure. Divisive at launch — no castles, just a goofy water gun and a wrongfully convicted plumber — it's aged into a GameCube classic.