Mario Weekend – Classic Mario Commercials November 17, 2012

From the late 90s to the early 00s, there was a very special phase that video game marketing was going through when it came to TV commercials.  Here was a fringe market being brought to a wide audience by a traditional media, and while they had no problem playing by the rules of traditional media, video games made sure to set themselves aside from everything else on the market.  In my opinion, NOBODY was better at this than Nintendo, and because of that there are a ton of great commercials out there that have been done for Nintendo games that as far as I’m concerned should be permanently archived.

Here are some of the best Mario related commercials that I could find from across the web.  Some of these have previously made my Top Ten Video Game Commercial video, but not all of them, and with it being Mario Weekend I felt now was a perfect opportunity to have all the game commercials I loved from Nintendo on display.  These are in chronological order.

Super Mario Land

I remember this commercial was one of the reasons that made me beg my parents for a Game Boy and this game for Christmas!  I just thought it was a great homage to classic B&W adventure serials, and given the B&W screen of the game boy it fit perfectly.  It was also nice to see a digital Mario interacting with the real world, which trust me looked extremely ground breaking at the time.

Super Mario RPG

Major points for originality here.  What other medium is going to have an awesome old man telling you what’s going on?

Paper Mario (N64)

I loved the sense of humor the marketing guys had with this one.  Since the characters are flat in the game, all the characters are depicted as paper cut outs interacting in the real world.  What is the most destructive thing you could imagine happening to paper?  Being stuck in a shredder of course!

Super Smash Bros

Do I really need to say anything about this one?  I think it just speaks for itself.