I've been meaning to make this article since the beginning 2000's about what Mario was around this time. However, because there was so little content in comparison to today (mainly Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2), it's been a rough journey if you had been following the character the whole time with the following points:

• Each game took too long to make
• Every game felt too different for the game to be coherent in it's approach to the players
• Mario was a meme that should have been taken of the pedestal for years (talking way back when Simpsons was still new)

What I want to go though is the story behind Mario, the character approach that kind of proved that the idea was more adult than it needed to be, and how players like me who main'd Mario in Melee when it first came out found out the hard way that we would be still talking about a now 40-year-old idea today.

The way I have looked at it is that when Super Mario World came out in the early 1990, the idea around Mario was fresh, but the approach was running into a wall that was going to meet new gamers quickly; they would find out the hard way that the pipeline for new gaming, including most platforming games to be getting shut off in favor of emerging styles and technologies when the merger switched from 2D gaming to 3D gaming.

What has happened is that over time, the players could see that Mario, the brand, was not necessarily on the decline, but it was reaching a point that going back meant an increasing amount of emulator usage since the games that were current were reaching the Nintendo 64 status, meaning that the style of games that players got used to were quickly falling into obscurity and games were becoming more expensive and more obtainable as the content was reaching maturity. This also meant that the idea was coming since both in the original real Mario movie, Super Mario Bros 3, and Super Mario World had decoded that Mario was not going to stay the little kid route; many people who got into gaming around the late 2000's would mistakenly believe that the content was going to mesh well for kids, but found out the hard way that Super Mario RPG flipped the script on that idea.

To break, essentially the main points were the following:

• Mario was not going to stay around for long
• The content was increasingly becoming a standard just for E3 showrings and missed primary objective to make the game series worth staying around for
• After some of the content, the odds were low that during the Nintendo 64 and GameCube era, the games would fail to provide enough content to be meaningful for players around this era.

The main thing I want to mention before I get into Super Mario RPG, the original movie, and Super Mario World is to look at the current speedrun timeframes for the original Super Mario Bros.:

The timeframes are so airtight that a player is better off watching the speedrun of the game.

The first thing to note that it is most likely people from the older generation who was playing Super Mario Bros. who was able to achieve times like this; it's hard for people around my age to feel anything for the original game since the aforementioned game was too old for people around my timeframe to be interested into. Some of us played it, but mostly, the game was on the outro.

Why the original movie, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario World mattered to this perspective is because of how it quickly changed that the intended target audience was not actually little kids who could play the game with parent's permission, but working age adults who could buy the game and play at their leisure. The movie had made subtle hit about the world in which Mario existed, but in an overall capacity, it was likely to be found that it was made for a target audience of adults in the 1990 who could identify with the character. This mean that once the content was made for a person who was not quite doing well in life, a.k.a. Mario, could attempt to find redemption with his employment only found he was hitting a wall due to his age and inability to get over obstacles with the lack of the jump; the jump ability itself was forever a problem for Mario since Mario need to be able to super jump, which his gaming counterpart naturally has, but actually cannot jump in the real version. This was extremely problematic for the character as there was subtle hints that the jump ability was not going to carry Mario for long after he lost the ability when you look at the sunken ship level in Super Mario World; things had followed Mario, but it was levels like this that told the player indirectly that Mario was going to fall far (which happened in the recent movie).

This also meant that when the player was going through the game in Super Mario RPG, this moment was ever-so-present when it's entirely illogical for the player to defeat king calamari in the sunken ship, you get to a point after defeating Yaridovich, it was just telling for players successful enough to get to this point in this game that the story was not going to go well; Bowser has lost his whole army and castle to a different enemy, and Mario was noticing around this time that nearly every attempt to be able to leave was garnered by the inability for a ship to be able to get him where he needed. Though the game was stating that he was trying to get powerstars to defeat Smithy, but inferred message over the years was that Mario was in the same situation of his current movie, but monsters easily were able to overpower and destroy any shy that sailed in those waters.

So uniquely, when Super Mario 64 had come out, the player knew that everything had fallen apart. Bowser was reduced to having to steal Peach's castle, but even then, the damaged suffered to Bowser was so extensive that from Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, All of the Mario and Luigi Saga Games, that Bowser could not recover from his castle being lost. The way I have seen it over time is that when a different kingdom is able to defeat your forces, Bowser was one of the main-line enemies that could not keep his act together because the older generation had already done the work to ensure that Bowser was not going to get anything. I do not know how much of this came from a realistic perspective of a person who was not able to regain the battlefield, but Bowser was extremely defeated and did not have anything to show over time.

It's one of those story that Nintendo was clearly not paying attention to their own game's story. They let their main enemy and Mario fall through an event horizon in which Mario was not going to be able to recover his story nor would thing every be able to go back to the days of old when the games had some meaning in the late 1990.

Essentially, all of this was foretold in the original movie, but back then, there was little content for Mario that I think they did not believe the Mario brand to be successful, which arguably is not as successful as one would hope from the outside. Many years later, the story behind the movie remains true today as the world remained an infested place of bad ideas and a story that was borrowing heavily from the old knights tales. I regret that anyone who believed today that placed like Twitch.tv could save the brand because not changed with the Mario series; the story is still the same, anyone who followed it finds the same problems, and Mario today should be called "The Tragedy of the Mario Bros." Nintendo in their current state did not pay attention, and just like Mario, it's more of an history lesson of why ideas that should not have passed was not going to stay around for long.