Amazing what adding online multiplayer, something fans were asking for AGES, can do for something like Mario Party - where the main draw is the kind of shenanigans and fuckery you can get into with 3 other players instead of CPUs.

@Wman1996 I agree with this, and it does help that Mario Party is not a yearly franchise anymore (based on their release schedule, the Switch 2 will likely have just 2 Mario Parties, one in 2027 and one in 2030). Mario Party probably would've been Top 5 on GameCube if it didn't have yearly releases.

@PAOerfulone To be fair, by the time online multiplayer was added, SMP had already sold nearly 15m units. Even without online, it was still becoming the best selling Mario Party.

Even the Mario RPGs spinoff series are doing pretty well, Mario RPGs is actually a bigger RPG seller than some established JRPG series like Tales of, Persona.

List of best-selling Eastern role-playing game franchises - Wikipedia

Mario RPG spinoffs are in the top 10 best selling JRPG series, and the numbers in the wikipedia page isn't fully accurate due to Paper Mario Thousand year door remake and Brothership isn't counted.

Form is temporary, class is permanent

The appeal of MK is broader but the impact Super Mario Bros has had and still has on the industry is way way bigger

I wonder if anyone remember Sonic Shuffle on the Dreamcast. Its not as fun as Mario Party... but its quite nice. I wonder if Sonic revives that and brings us Sonic Shuffle 2 for Switch/ Switch 2/ PS5 and Xbox Series...

Can we not include 3DMario as part of Super Mario Bros.

Ok, thank you.

What the actual f...

Super Mario 64

Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Odissey

The only element not in those names is Bros, but Luigi is pretty much always there (in the games themselves)!

No, just no.

Please dont try and force the 3d trash into the near perfect Bros legacy.

Odyssey lol. Mario plant pot could never be SMB cannon.

SMB 3 is better than 64.

World is better than Galaxy.

NSMBWii is better than Odyssey.

3d Mario is basically a BanjoKazzoie mod (without the charm)

I'm going to say no, Super Mario has not surpassed Mario Kart in terms of capturing the minds of fans. And to prove this, I'm going to use the most scientific metric I can think of: memes.

Think about how many phrases and shorthands are taken from Super Mario. 1-Ups are still used to refer to extra lives in general, Ghost Houses is still used to refer to mazelike haunted locations in games, TV Tropes uses phrases like Lethal Laval Land and Shifting Sand Land to refer to Volcano and Desert levels, etc.

On the website Know Your Meme, individual memes are saved by a bunch of volunteers. It isn't scientific, but generally the more popular bits of culture are reflected in the numbers on this website. The "Mario Kart" entry has 11 sub-entries and over 530 images in its gallery. The Super Mario category? 73 sub-entries and over 4150 images. Super Mario Odyssey alone has a similar image count to Mario Kart, with 534 images in its gallery.

ANOTHER way to look at the question is in the games themselves. In Mario Kart, many of the tracks are based on themes and locations in the Super Mario series. In MK8, most of the roster had their debuts in platformers, tracks use series motiffs like airships and castles, and various sprites and visual elements from the Super Mario series litter the game. In contrast, how many Mario Kart elements appear in Super Mario Odyssey or Super Mario Bros Wonder?