You actually don't have to dig nearly as deeply as you might think you do in order to find the inherent weirdness in the world of Mario games. For starters, Mario is a plumber who used to be a construction worker and is also sometimes a doctor. His brother is Luigi, who sometimes is his identical twin and other times is slimmer and a foot taller than Mario. The love of his life is the princess of a land of ♋mushroom people who are constantly being terrorized by a bipedal, turtle-esque beast and his turtle army who have wings and throw hammers and some of w💞hich may or may not be his children.
In all seriousness—such as seriousness is going to exist in this list—the Mario games definitely get weird beyond just the general fantastical strangeness of their basic world and premise. When a game character has been around for nearly 40 years, and has evolved to be the all-purpose Mickey Mouse of his company, there are bound to be a lot of bizarre facets to his legacy. While things obviously go off the rails on the rare occasion that Nintendo has let another company take a crack at Mario, even within the games developed in-house there are a lot of really wacky adventures that Mario has gone on. And don't think for a second that the core Super Mario series of platformers is ex꧂empt from that, either.
Just to mix things up a bit, though, we're going to also include some Mario 🔯games that deserve 📖a remake in this list. We wouldn't want you to have weirdness overload.
30 Weird: Hotel M꧑ario
It's hard to fathom now, but there was a (very) brief period when another company had the rights to develop and publish Mario and Zelda games with zero input from Nintendo. The results we♔re almost universally te🐽rrible, of course.
Hotel Mario's actual gameplay mechanics aren't completely broken, they are just utterly boring: a puzzle game revolving around opening and closing doors. But it's the abysmal animated cutscenes that look like they were d﷽one in two hours by a team of five-year-olds that is the most perplexing thing about this shameful release.
29 Weird: Mario + Rabbiཧds Kingdom Battꦑle
We never said that all the weird games on this list were going 𒆙to be bad—in fact, some of them are pretty great, which definitely applies to this family-friendly take on the turn-based strateg🧸y genre that is honestly one of the best Switch games so far.
It's not so much the crossover itself that is bizarre, but the Rabbid doppelgängers of the familiar Mario characters.
The Rabbids themselves have always been strange, but to see them enter 🐽the Mushroom Kingd🗹om and interact with Mario and company is as jarring as it is hilarious.
28 Weird: Super ✤Mario Bros. 2 (U.S.)
While it is many people's favorite Mario game to this day, there is no way to frame Super Mario Bros. 2 as anything but odd. In fact, its setting, the bulk of its enemies, and most of its mechanics have still yet to return to the Mario series in anything but the tiniest of bursts.
While the game is set in Mario's dreams (kind of) which explains why he and his pals feel so out of place, it still never fully feels like a true Mario game—which is exactly what so many people lo𒀰ve about it.
27 ♓ 🐼 Weird: Mario's Game Gallery/Mario's FUNdamentals
In the mid-90s, Nintendo let various developers of educational software borrow Mario and friends for use in various learning-type video games. One of the results of this deal was the boring PC release Mario's Game Gallery, later ported to Macintosh as Mario's FUNdamentals for some reason.
Essentially a collection of traditional family board games like checkers, Go Fish, an൩d an off-brand Yahtzee knockoff called "Yacht," the Nintendo assets just end up being pointless window dressing on a bland title that does have one neat distinction: it's actually Charles Martinet's debut as the🦄 voice of Mario.
26 Weird: I Am A Teacher—Super Mario Swea꧋ter ಌ
On paper, it's an interesting idea—a video game that lets you design your own cust✅om images for a sweater and have a professional company actually make it for you. But this was 1988, so the entire process was needlessly expensive and cumbersome.
Given its obscurity, it's tough to know for sure just how much freedom you had in your designs in I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater, but we're guessing you probably had to largely just stick to some basic version of Mario's sprite. And at $24 in 1980s money to have ꦫthe sweater made, it was too cost-prohibitive for mainstream consumers.
25 𒁏 Needs A Remakꦺe: Super Mario Land 2
It's pretty tough to play an original Game Boy game these days. And that is a shame for a release like Super Mario Land 2, since the game itself is well worth revisiting and deserves to be appreciated as much as any other 2D Mario game.
If nothing else, just fully colorizing the game and optimizing it for televisions would go a long way in reviving this fairly forgotten classic.
Ideally, though, Super Mario Land 2 should see some full-on Super Mario All-Stars caliber remake that takes the original's invent🐼ive worlds and power-ups and brings them up to modern visual standards.
24 Weir�🌳�d: Mario Is Missing!
Poor Luigi—he had to make his debut as a m💃ain character in this strange and complete꧑ly forgettable point-and-click educational game.
What makes games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? so revered is their ease-of-play. Mario is Missing, on the other hand, is completely obtuse and needless cumberso💟me, making figuring out how to even play the thing the bigger challenge than finding youඣr missing brother. Worst of all, the developers tried to combine existing Mario assets with their own generic original art, making for a game that lacks any sort of aesthetic cohesion.
23 ಌ Weird: Wrecking Crew
Mario's "day job" is said to be plumbing—though that really only manifests itself through the pipes present in the games and little else. In his Donkey Kong debut, he was more of a construction worker, which Nintendo actually revisited for the 1985 game Wrecking Crew.
Never is Mario more in "work mode" than he is in Wrecking Crew.
The single-screen game involves Mario destroying various elements of the environment in an almost reverse-Fix It Felix. His look in the game is pretty jarring as well, calling back to Mario Bros. but releasing the same year as Super Mario Bros.
22 🅺 🌌 Weird: Mario Clash
Everything about the Virtual Boy is weird—that its graphics are entirely red on black backgrounds, that you had to set it up on a table rather than be able to wear൩ it, and that it actually made it to market.
Even weirder is that Mario Clash wound up serving as the main "Mario game" for the platform, a pseudo-remake of the original Mario Bros. set on awkward 3D planesꦗ. Why this over a more traditional, modern platformer? It's as if they didn't have much faith in this𒉰 console or something...
21 🌄 Weird: Mario's Bombs Away▨ (Game & Watch)
For those🉐 that don't know, Game & Watch was a series of LCD devices that doubled as a digital watch and ♛a simple video game (get it?). Each one contained just a single game, and the mechanics were usually of the "easy to learn, difficult to master" school of game design.
While most of them involved innocent tasks like working in a factory, Mario's Bombs Away saw Mario take on the role of a Beetle Bailey-esque soldier in a very obviously Vietna😼m War-inspired backdrop as he caught bombs thr꧅own from trees. Not surprisingly, this one is never really referenced anymore.