Mga retro na laro ng Mario sa browser

The plumber in the red cap needs no introduction. Mario games have been with us for more than forty years, and for most people they mean a Nintendo console. What far fewer people remember is that Mario also had a second life on the PC: a whole side branch of the family tree made up of typing tutors, geography lessons, board game collections and, much later, remarkable fan-made conversions. That branch is exactly what you can play on this page — in the browser, for free, with no download, no installer and no account.

Start with Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. is the obvious first click. The 1985 original invented the vocabulary that every platformer still speaks — run, jump, stomp, hidden pipe, flagpole — and its first level is still handed to design students as a lesson in teaching without words. If you want the feel of the 16-bit era, the fan remake Super Mario World DX brings Yoshi and the cape to a PC screen, and the ambitious Super Mario 64 MS-DOS Port squeezes Mario's leap into 3D onto a machine that was never supposed to run it.

The strange PC Mario games of the nineties

In the early nineties Mario was licensed to PC publishers for a run of educational titles that are far more interesting today than anyone expected. Mario is Missing! is the famous one: Mario has vanished, so you play as Luigi and wander real world cities, returning stolen landmarks and answering questions about them. Mario's Time Machine uses the same idea on history, sending you back to return artefacts Bowser has looted from the past. Mario Teaches Typing turned home row drills into a side-scrolling level where Mario runs when your fingers do, and Mario's Game Gallery sits you down for checkers, chess, backgammon and dominoes against a Mario who talks back between moves.

Homebrew Mario on DOS

The third strand is pure enthusiasm. Through the nineties, shareware discs and school computer labs circulated home-made Mario platformers written by hobbyists, and Mario and Luigi is the best known of them — a two-player DOS platformer that is far more playable than it has any right to be. These games were never sold in shops; they spread on floppies, bulletin boards and copied CDs, which is why so many players over thirty remember a Mario that Nintendo never made.

What you can play, and what you can only read about

Being honest about this matters. Nintendo's own console classics — Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, the Mario Party and Paper Mario series — appear on this page as catalogue profiles: screenshots, background, credits and where the game is sold today. They are still commercially available from the rights holder, so we do not offer them for play. Everything linked above, on the other hand, starts with one click: pick a title, give the emulator a few seconds, and use the keyboard or the on-screen controls on a phone. The princess is not going to rescue herself.