This is awesome and exactly the sort of useless but valuable study I come here for. Good job.
Also, I think you should analyze the frequency of color choices when Mario is the first word or not the first word of the title. I want to see whether M is red for "Super Mario X", "Mario X", or "Other Other Mario Other Other". I imagine it might be tempting to make the very first letter red, or maybe make the first "big" letter red.
I'm a Brit who's lived in America for ~8.5 years. There are plenty of differences in language usage that I've observed, but this isn't one of them. Curious to know what they meant by this.
I found a what I think is a flaw in the methodology and started to write a comment, but it turned into its own article. If you've ever wondered what the entropy of the Mario colour sequence is, let's find out! https://entropicthoughts.com/the-most-mario-colour-revisited
You could, if you wanted to, add 13.47 million sales of 3D World to your chart. That might change some numbers, but not in your favor.
“As of March 2024, Bowser's Fury has sold 13.47 million units worldwide in association with the Switch version of 3D World, making it one of the best-selling games on the console.”
It’s a little funny that the reason you wrote your own was because you found mine to be flawed, only to find out there were flaws in your own that might swing the whole conclusion you were hoping for!
To be clear, I'm not as invested into the conclusion as it may seem. The jabs in the direction of Mario 64 are mainly an attempt at humour. My actual preference is for the early white non-polygonal title designs.
I read this, and then a couple others of your posts -- I love your approach and interests, internet stranger! When I "grow up" I want to be more like you
edit: I'm also a big fan of your obvious love and devotion to your wife :)
Yes, I write in intense bursts, and I have previously gotten feedback from RSS subscribers that it's hard to keep up when long periods of silence are followed by a dump of ten articles in two weeks. So I try to splay publish times a bit.
(Also far from all of the articles in that six-month queue are finished, but far along enough that I've picked a publish date for them.)
The color of the last letter for Odyssey would probably be pink :) There's a moon in Metro where you have to spell out Mario's name with the title letters, and the O is pink there. https://www.mariowiki.com/Letter_(Super_Mario_Odyssey)
This was fun. I'd like to see some analysis regarding where "Mario" appears in the title (either in terms of words or characters) and how that affects the color sequence. Glancing briefly at the list, it appears the M is more likely to be blue when it is preceded by "Super" (but not always).
Super Mario World has a green M. (multicolor Super)
Super Mario Ball has a red M. (yellow Super)
Super Mario 3D World and Land have a red M. (multicolor Super)
Super Mario Odyssey has a red M. (white Super)
Super Mario 64 has a blue M. (multicolor Super)
Super Mario Galaxy and 2 have a blue M. (white Super)
> The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was introduced with Super Mario World.
I believe the polygonal logo style was first used by super mario bros. 3 (at least for the shape, it didn't have the alternating colors yet as it was all blue). It isn't on the nes boxes but it is on the title screen and on the famicom box.
You might enjoy this video that attempts to rigorously define how many "mainline" Mario games there are among the hundreds that exist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw
also the results of these findings could be combined, from the glimpse of it for the "super mario" series specifically BGYRG is a more prevalent color sequence, while RGYBG is more common among sports spin-offs
Damn, according to that list there are 382 games in the series so far, without counting the various spinoffs and sub series where Mario doesn't play a starring role (Yoshi, Donkey Kong Country, Wario Land, WarioWare, Princess Peach Showtime, etc).
Yeah, a full list of games in the series analysed like this would go on for something like 500 pages.
I wouldn't be surprised. Probably because Mickey hasn't starred in anything relevant for a large part of the younger generation in many years, maybe even decades. Disney doesn't really make movies staring Mickey anymore. Mickey in games exists but is also rare and usually these games are fairly niche.
Might be cool to see how scores changes if we weight in by game popularity. I was thinking of just whatever score generated by a gpt function, or by play data in game libraries/trackers.
On another topic, it makes me wonder how they actually decide what colors should go in the name and how much time they spend on it. Do they have the data laid out like this? Or they just wing it?
Do you think it’s up to the designer of the day? Does it follow intuitive designer patterns that even Nintendo hasn’t explicitly spelled out internally?
It’s true! Though a multicolor logo for the Super Mario Bros. 3 title screen does appear on the SNES and GBA (Super Mario Advance) version, which is super fun but I didn’t include it because it wasn’t on the box art that way.
Still waiting for the Feynman Lectures on Mario Physics to drop :-).
I thought this was a great way to practice data analysis, I wonder if you could correlate it with registered trademarks from Nintendo. Specifically do they always trademark the whole name? Or are there specific 'Mario' trademarks in the specific color scheme.
The other thing that I pondered was if this was a scheme to detect/delay counterfeiters of Mario game cartridges. Back in the day there were a lot of dodgy game carts on the "used" market. Coming out with a different color ordering would force the counterfeiters to take some time to change their artwork before shipping their goods.
I just wanted to comment to say that the design of this blog / personal website is incredible. A very minimalistic, nostalgic, and yet modern take on personal websites from the Geocities era.
This is funny because a while back I was looking at all of my Mario games on the Switch and noticed that, of them all, only 1 title had a different color scheme for the word Mario. I thought that was really interesting, but never looked into the other game titles. Thanks for going to the next level.
The goal was to determine what colors are chosen for a “random” appearance. A (Mario Party) logo that arranges the colors chromatically may include more than just 6 or 7 colors, thereby having two greens, and it becomes confusing to where you draw the line on what color each is defined as. This “arbitrary rule” is kinda related to not including logos that are one color, because similarly including that data would affect determining what the ideal “random” appearance would be. Chromatic or single color do not appear random.
Oh wow, it's Louie Mantia. I remember them from their superb Icon Factory releases. Still have zips of their icons from 2009 (!). What an amazing crew of talent from what I feel was a kind of golden age period of icon creation and OS customization.
And the blog's logo has 4 letters n 4 mario colors. They aren't a sequence (YGVR) that is found in any title for the first 4 letters. For the last 4 letters either, but Maro Party 7 is a close match with: YGVO.
Really cool writeup and I have to say that your little animated logo at the footer looks incredibly good. On the homepage your new-old buttons for social media are also incredible. Thanks for all of your work keeping that style alive.
It’s been a conscious effort to reduce the amount of obligations in my life, and I’m proud to have free time to spend any way I want to, even if someone else might consider it a trivial waste of time.
Having this much free time is, at least in my opinion, something really good, since it allows you to do anything, for example this analysis for the colors in the letters of the Mario name. Sure, it may not be useful for many people, but it is really interesting for those times I got nothing to do.
Also, I think you should analyze the frequency of color choices when Mario is the first word or not the first word of the title. I want to see whether M is red for "Super Mario X", "Mario X", or "Other Other Mario Other Other". I imagine it might be tempting to make the very first letter red, or maybe make the first "big" letter red.