| KungKras said: Nostalgia hasn't saved other franchises that have been big from becoming niche or dissapearing. NSMBW is selling just as well as SMB3 and SMW. It's also amazing how the Mario franchise still makes new fans, but I guess little kids really miss the late 80's. Just stop using the nostagia argument. It's been proven wrong over and over again, it's just becoming redundant. |
Ah I see. Rather than responding to my point, you are responding to the posts that other people have made which indluded the word nostalgia.
Don't be confused! I'm not saying that nostalgia is what sells Mario. I'm saying that Mario is of such and such a level of mega-icon because of nostalgia. Compared to other headliners, Mario has an added benefit of nostalgia. Of course, if you read my post at all like you should when deciding to insult a post, you would have seen that I wrote that Mario also has the qualities of being personable, likable, and versatile.
Those are all important factors as well.
Now I don't know how old you are or how old you were when Sonic/Crash bandicoot came out. Both were huge rivals to Mario. They were each about as big in popularity. Sonic, your very own avatar, was quite possibly equal or more popular when it came out. However, Sonic games pretty much died off and he just didn't have the kind of exposure that Mario does. See, that's where one of those qualities fits in: versatility. Mario can appear in anything, he is basically a stick figure as in he has no real key defining ability other than throwing things, jumping, and entering pipes.
Sonic has spinning and running. He has no real "relatable" abilities other than running, which is a limited application. You can only use running in so many types of games, whereas throwing things is much more useful.
These qualities in turn lead to more varied types of games and higher levels of exposure. It's been proven in psychology that exposure to things as a child results in higher levels of affinity with said objects. So, if nostalgia did not exist at all, any new character would be able to compete on an even measure with Mario.
Character design is only a small piece of the puzzle. Nostalgia is the reason things exceed being well known to becoming pop icons.
EDIT: In fact, Nostalgia is probably one of the main reasons that some people still buy Sonic games.
