The Most Mario Colors | Hacker News Reader

The Most Mario Colors

lmnt.me

599 pointsingve82 comments

This is awesome and exactly the sort of useless but valuable study I come here for. Good job.

Also, I think you should analyze the frequency of color choices when Mario is the first word or not the first word of the title. I want to see whether M is red for "Super Mario X", "Mario X", or "Other Other Mario Other Other". I imagine it might be tempting to make the very first letter red, or maybe make the first "big" letter red.

Not sure about “should” but I definitely “could” do this.

I vote "should"

British "should", or American "should"?

English is not my native language, is there a difference?

ChatGPT Reports some differences: https://chatgpt.com/share/67935d04-a9a8-8001-8df0-b11452e722...

Or perhaps you made a joke and it flew over my head :)

I'm a Brit who's lived in America for ~8.5 years. There are plenty of differences in language usage that I've observed, but this isn't one of them. Curious to know what they meant by this.

British English tends to have extra (read: nascent) u's in it after o's, but "should" is spelled the same in British and American English.

Example -

British have colourful neighbours.

Americans have colorful neighbors.

I found a what I think is a flaw in the methodology and started to write a comment, but it turned into its own article. If you've ever wondered what the entropy of the Mario colour sequence is, let's find out! https://entropicthoughts.com/the-most-mario-colour-revisited

I'm curious why you have your post set to be posted on 2025-06-24 instead today? Is that to maintain a post schedule?

Yes, I write in intense bursts, and I have previously gotten feedback from RSS subscribers that it's hard to keep up when long periods of silence are followed by a dump of ten articles in two weeks. So I try to splay publish times a bit.

(Also far from all of the articles in that six-month queue are finished, but far along enough that I've picked a publish date for them.)

You could, if you wanted to, add 13.47 million sales of 3D World to your chart. That might change some numbers, but not in your favor.

“As of March 2024, Bowser's Fury has sold 13.47 million units worldwide in association with the Switch version of 3D World, making it one of the best-selling games on the console.”

Also your Sparks of Hope number only represents physical copies sold in the first week in Japan only. It’s about 3 million now.

Might be worth double-checking your numbers across the board.

Drat! I did not intend for this to become a long quest for accuracy. I do welcome the corrections, though.

It’s a little funny that the reason you wrote your own was because you found mine to be flawed, only to find out there were flaws in your own that might swing the whole conclusion you were hoping for!

To be clear, I'm not as invested into the conclusion as it may seem. The jabs in the direction of Mario 64 are mainly an attempt at humour. My actual preference is for the early white non-polygonal title designs.

But yes, this is Muphry's law in action. ;)

I read this, and then a couple others of your posts -- I love your approach and interests, internet stranger! When I "grow up" I want to be more like you

edit: I'm also a big fan of your obvious love and devotion to your wife :)

I found what I think is a flaw in your methodology: you did not use the Mario font in your post.

Wow, your website's design (and content) really remind me of Gwern.net or LessWrong. Were those the main inspiration?

The color of the last letter for Odyssey would probably be pink :) There's a moon in Metro where you have to spell out Mario's name with the title letters, and the O is pink there. https://www.mariowiki.com/Letter_(Super_Mario_Odyssey)

Million percent! I had this conversation with a few people before posting. In my heart, it’s pink.

This was fun. I'd like to see some analysis regarding where "Mario" appears in the title (either in terms of words or characters) and how that affects the color sequence. Glancing briefly at the list, it appears the M is more likely to be blue when it is preceded by "Super" (but not always).

Specifically the Super needs to have individualized colors per letter. Where S is red M cannot be and therefore is blue instead.

Super Mario World has a green M. (multicolor Super)

Super Mario Ball has a red M. (yellow Super) Super Mario 3D World and Land have a red M. (multicolor Super) Super Mario Odyssey has a red M. (white Super)

Super Mario 64 has a blue M. (multicolor Super) Super Mario Galaxy and 2 have a blue M. (white Super)

Not much rhyme or reason, I think!

This was fun. People should do fun things more often :)

> The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was introduced with Super Mario World.

I believe the polygonal logo style was first used by super mario bros. 3 (at least for the shape, it didn't have the alternating colors yet as it was all blue). It isn't on the nes boxes but it is on the title screen and on the famicom box.

A is the most consistent (green), but you can see how over time the M settled into being red and almost never deviates from that now. Great post!

I am a little disturbed by how many Mario games that is. Wow.

You might enjoy this video that attempts to rigorously define how many "mainline" Mario games there are among the hundreds that exist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw

there has been a revision/sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ddmjcy3lEs

also the results of these findings could be combined, from the glimpse of it for the "super mario" series specifically BGYRG is a more prevalent color sequence, while RGYBG is more common among sports spin-offs

Ohhh thats not even all of them! Be prepared... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_featurin...

Damn, according to that list there are 382 games in the series so far, without counting the various spinoffs and sub series where Mario doesn't play a starring role (Yoshi, Donkey Kong Country, Wario Land, WarioWare, Princess Peach Showtime, etc).

Yeah, a full list of games in the series analysed like this would go on for something like 500 pages.

Agreed. Pretty epic franchise.

Someone at Disney is reading this and deciding they’ve still got many many StarWars and Marvel movies they can make.

I heard somewhere that globally, Mario is more recognizable by people than Mickey mouse.

I've gone back and forth on whether I believe that, but what a amazing concept if it's true! What do you think?

I wouldn't be surprised. Probably because Mickey hasn't starred in anything relevant for a large part of the younger generation in many years, maybe even decades. Disney doesn't really make movies staring Mickey anymore. Mickey in games exists but is also rare and usually these games are fairly niche.

I’d be surprised if it isn’t true. Mickey Mouse hasn’t been very present anymore outside of Kingdom Hearts and the Disney parks.

Mario teaches typing, Mario is missing. Where are my other Mario’s?

This data is very incomplete, and thus I conclude that there are very many Mario’s missing.

This analysis was limited to titles with polygon and multicolor logos.

Mario is missing is just regular text. Mario teaches typing is multicolor, but not the polygon style.

The box art is regular text, but immediately in game after starting the cartridge you get polygonal multicolored text.

GBYRG

Title screen seems more authoritative than box art, which during the NES/SNES era was quite wild. (See megaman)

It's great how the most niche of posts still find their aficionados <3

Oh, that explains Hotel Mario being missing.

Just my 2 cents on the research:

Might be cool to see how scores changes if we weight in by game popularity. I was thinking of just whatever score generated by a gpt function, or by play data in game libraries/trackers.

On another topic, it makes me wonder how they actually decide what colors should go in the name and how much time they spend on it. Do they have the data laid out like this? Or they just wing it?

Thanks for the read, I enjoyed it

Do you think it’s up to the designer of the day? Does it follow intuitive designer patterns that even Nintendo hasn’t explicitly spelled out internally?

The polygonal letters first appeared in Super Mario Bros. 3, on the title screen and Japanese box art, but they were monochromatically blue.

It’s true! Though a multicolor logo for the Super Mario Bros. 3 title screen does appear on the SNES and GBA (Super Mario Advance) version, which is super fun but I didn’t include it because it wasn’t on the box art that way.

Oh dang, I just emailed you saying that! Sorry for the noise :(

Still waiting for the Feynman Lectures on Mario Physics to drop :-).

I thought this was a great way to practice data analysis, I wonder if you could correlate it with registered trademarks from Nintendo. Specifically do they always trademark the whole name? Or are there specific 'Mario' trademarks in the specific color scheme.

The other thing that I pondered was if this was a scheme to detect/delay counterfeiters of Mario game cartridges. Back in the day there were a lot of dodgy game carts on the "used" market. Coming out with a different color ordering would force the counterfeiters to take some time to change their artwork before shipping their goods.

> Still waiting for the Feynman Lectures on Mario Physics to drop :-).

Wait no longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcI1kUvVMYM

I'd say this one is even more relevant: https://youtu.be/YsXCVsDFiXA

Almost 4 hours long? The wall I hit was my patience.

I enjoyed this article as much for the presentation as I did for the content.

I just wanted to comment to say that the design of this blog / personal website is incredible. A very minimalistic, nostalgic, and yet modern take on personal websites from the Geocities era.

I love this.

Always fun to have brand guidelines reverse-engineered. Great analysis!

This is funny because a while back I was looking at all of my Mario games on the Switch and noticed that, of them all, only 1 title had a different color scheme for the word Mario. I thought that was really interesting, but never looked into the other game titles. Thanks for going to the next level.

> The sequence of colors cannot be in rainbow order

Why though? Seems like an arbitrary thing to exclude. How does that affect the results?

The goal was to determine what colors are chosen for a “random” appearance. A (Mario Party) logo that arranges the colors chromatically may include more than just 6 or 7 colors, thereby having two greens, and it becomes confusing to where you draw the line on what color each is defined as. This “arbitrary rule” is kinda related to not including logos that are one color, because similarly including that data would affect determining what the ideal “random” appearance would be. Chromatic or single color do not appear random.

How many logos did that rule end up excluding? Just the mario party logo?

Can’t say for sure, but Mario Party 9, Mario Party Island Tour, Mario Party Star Rush, and Mario Party: The Top 100 all had rainbow logos.

Mario Party 9, Island Tour, and The Top 100 roughly have the same arrangement, which contains arguably three shades of green (MARIIOPARTY).

Oh wow, it's Louie Mantia. I remember them from their superb Icon Factory releases. Still have zips of their icons from 2009 (!). What an amazing crew of talent from what I feel was a kind of golden age period of icon creation and OS customization.

And the blog's logo has 4 letters n 4 mario colors. They aren't a sequence (YGVR) that is found in any title for the first 4 letters. For the last 4 letters either, but Maro Party 7 is a close match with: YGVO.

Really cool writeup and I have to say that your little animated logo at the footer looks incredibly good. On the homepage your new-old buttons for social media are also incredible. Thanks for all of your work keeping that style alive.

Thank you!

Didn't realize how strange Yoshi looked on the Super Mario World cover

Quality post. Thank you for your time on this effort.

Thanks for reading!

Very informative, I'll be sure to study this to inform my fellow citizens close to me know about these facts

Love the detail that went into the post, and I really like the whole website! Feels comfy

Thanks for saying that. ♡

I do not care one bit about the mario logo colors but this was a well written article

For completion's sake, this task isn't finished without with Japanese マリオ.

Stuff like this is what's great about the web.

Are there any Mario iterm2 color schemes?

Why do I love this so much

Super Mario sunshine blatantly missing

The Sunshine logo was (1) not multicolor, and (2) with sufficiently different lettering than the usual style.

I disagree on both points:

1. The color is BBBBY

2. The lettering has the same 3D block polygonal font as Super Mario 64, with some stylization

You really have a lot of free time.

It’s been a conscious effort to reduce the amount of obligations in my life, and I’m proud to have free time to spend any way I want to, even if someone else might consider it a trivial waste of time.

Ignore the haters who spend just as much free time playing video games as you spent making something interesting.

Excuse me, haters? I did not mean to hate on OP.

Having this much free time is, at least in my opinion, something really good, since it allows you to do anything, for example this analysis for the colors in the letters of the Mario name. Sure, it may not be useful for many people, but it is really interesting for those times I got nothing to do.

This is the kind of wonderful absurd info that the web used to contain on smaller sites. This is to be celebrated.

What a wonderful thing, for a person to have the time to pursue their interests!

Yeah! That's really good.

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