Nintendo’s flagship gaming series is one with a plentiful amount of games. With over 40 years of history, Mario has maintained its reputation as the biggest gaming series ever. Due to the sheer popularity of the series, it’s only natural to expect many of Mario’s greatest games would be brought to new platforms to appeal to a wider audience.
While his popularity only ever grows, many games in the series have unfortunately been left behind. With a catalog this big, it’s nearly impossible for every game to be given another chance. For one reason or another, these Mario games haven’t had a second shot in the limelight.
9 Mario And Sonic At The Olympic Games
At one point in time, the thought of Mario and Sonic starring alongside each other in the same game was unthinkable, but in 2008 in accordance with the Beijing Olympics, the two crossed paths for the first time in a sports minigame collection.
The game features 24 Olympic-based minigames and various characters from both the Mario and Sonic series. Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games went on to become a series, releasing a new entry to coincide with each Olympics, with the exception of the 2018 Winter Games. Even though the series has a handful of entries at this point, no game in the series has been re-released in any capacity, including the original, perhaps due to the timeliness of each entry.
8 Mario Superstar Baseball
In typical Mario Sports fashion, Mario Superstar baseball is a game anyone familiar with the sport can understand, but with a Mario twist. The game is filled to the brim with all kinds Mario characters, and designed in a way where drafting a team has a lot of room for depth and creativity, as some characters have better on-field chemistry with each other than others. Topped with special mechanics like star hits and pitches, and this is a very fun baseball game.
While the follow-up Mario Super Sluggers was re-released on the Wii U eShop, Mario Superstars Baseball has remained on the GameCube since its release. While a new Mario Baseball game is a possibility, bringing the classic to modern platforms would be greatly appreciated.
7 Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix
One of the most bizarre Mario spin-offs ever made, Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix is an at-home DDR game featuring remixes of Mario music made for the GameCube.
The game plays like any other DDR installment, but the novelty of this game doesn’t come from its gameplay; it comes from seeing the cast of Mario break it down. The game featured a DDR mat made specifically for the GameCube, and while making a new DDR for modern platforms isn’t an impossibility, doing so just for a re-release of an old game seems like an unlikely consideration for Nintendo in the future.
6 Mario Paint
Bundled with the Super Nintendo Mouse accessory, Mario Paint was an avenue on the Super Nintendo for gamers at the time to express their creativity. The game consisted of various modes, such as drawing, creating stamps, animating, and, most famously, creating music.
Given that it takes advantage of a very specific accessory for a console that was released in the early 90s, it makes sense that whenever Nintendo re-releases its Super Nintendo library, Mario Paint has never made an appearance. Even so, Mario Paint has remained popular on the internet, as people have used its music tool to create plenty of popular remixes over the years.
For whatever reason, Mario Sports games don’t often see re-releases. While Mario Power Tennis was remade 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 has featured 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 with Mario Golf: Super Rush, fans of the series still regard Toadstool Tour as the greatest in the series and hope that one day it can be given 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 on a few occasions, most of the series hasn’t seen the light of day since their initial release, as every console Mario Party from four through ten has remained 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 recognized in games like Mario Party Superstars and Mario Party The Top 100, but none of them have been given the remake or port treatment, 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 long for a game that captures the magic of the originals, and while Paper Mario on Nintendo 64 has been ported a handful of times, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has never had a second chance in the spotlight.
Having some of the most memorable characters, stories, and environments in the Mario series, The Thousand-Year Door became a fan-favorite among Mario fans, RPG fans, and other gamers. Since The Thousand Year Door, no Paper Mario installment has followed its traditional RPG style. While returning to this formula would be a dream come true, seeing this masterpiece on newer platforms would be fantastic as well.
2 Super Mario 3D Land
Most Mainline Mario platformers have been remade or ported in some 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 and gave the system the breath of life it needed after a mostly lackluster first year on the market.
A sequel to 3D Land came out a few years later with the release of Super Mario 3D World. This sequel expanded heavily on what 3D Land built, featuring all new power-ups, characters, game modes, and multiplayer support. 3D World was given a fresh new chance on the Switch, with Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, a port of the game featuring an all-new game alongside it. While 3D World was given a fantastic port, 3D Land appears to have been left in the dust, as over a decade since the original launch it hasn’t been released again. Here’s hoping it can get a port just as incredible as 3D World someday.
1 Mario Kart Double-Dash/Wii/7
Mario Kart is a series that has nearly overtaken the mainline platformers at this point. The best-selling game on every Nintendo platform since the Wii has been a Mario Kart game, and four of the ten best-selling Mario games of all time are Mario Kart games, including number one. While these types of statistics 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 have never been 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 Wii introduced motorcycles to the series, and Mario Kart 7 allowed for kart customization for the first time. For as much as a household name as Mario Kart is, it is perplexing that these titles haven’t been given another chance, and we can only one day hope that all Mario Karts are playable on the same platform one day.
