Tim | 25 Mar 2025
The Super Mario Fan Survey – The Results
Super Mario 64 is the best Mario game. Chain Chomps are scarier than ghosts. And exactly no one knows the names of the songs. These are just a few of the insights from our great Super Mario fan survey! Let’s break it down.
Best and First Games
To start, we asked about the best game. Not an easy task, considering the Mario Wiki lists a whopping 415 titles featuring the most famous mustache in gaming history (sorry, Dr. Egghead, Captain Price, and Solid Snake from Metal Gear 4). So, we focused on the main series, and Super Mario 64 took the top spot with 19.6% of the votes, narrowly beating Super Mario World with 18.9%. The Lost Levels from 1986 unsurprisingly landed in last place, while the author of these lines can hardly believe that the brilliant Super Mario Galaxy 2 received only 2.6% of the votes!
Even though Super Mario 64 ranked first, the Elbenwald community overall — specifically, 62.5% — prefers the 2D adventures of the overalls-wearing hero. We know for a fact that Mario’s first adventure started in 2D, but we also wanted to know what the community’s first Mario adventure was. However, analyzing this was tricky, as we opted for a free-text field instead of listing all 415 titles. Due to various spellings and partly identical names, we can only provide a trend, but five titles stood out:
- Super Mario Bros. (984 mentions)
- Super Mario World (882 mentions)
- Super Mario 64 (768 mentions)
- Super Mario Land (566 mentions)
- Super Mario Kart (530 mentions)
Levels and Music
The overall preference for 2D also aligns with this: 56.3% of the participants favor a classic linear level selection over an open-world design, as seen in Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Galaxy. Speaking of levels: We wanted to know if underwater levels are really as bad as their reputation suggests. The short answer: Yep! Only 15.1% of participants love underwater levels, while 41.3% dislike them. To be fair, 43.5% think the underwater music is pretty great.
Speaking of music: The survey creator (that’s me) spent an INSANE amount of time researching the best music tracks. There are three reasons for this. First, there’s a ton of Mario music. Second, I’ve had GameChops’ lo-fi remixes on repeat for years. And third, before the research, I could hardly name a single Mario track correctly, except for something like Dire, Dire Docks.
Well, turns out I’m not alone. Although the Main Theme from Super Mario Bros. (1985) took first place with 25.9% of the votes, it won by just ONE vote over the option, "Nobody knows the names of these pieces!" The rest of the answers fall under “also-rans,” but you can find the top 5 below.
Enemies, Items & More
Let’s quickly check off a few points: “It’s a-me, Mario!” was chosen as the favorite Mario quote by 43.6% of participants. The most popular transformation item is the Fire Flower (20%), and in games like Mario Kart, Yoshi is the most picked playable character (35%). Speaking of Mario Kart: There was a tight race for the most intimidating standard enemy. The Top 5 are incredibly close:
And now for the Mario movies. We thought it’d be funny to first ask generally about the “Mario movie” and then, in the following question, specify the 2023 animated film. This seemingly clever idea led to rather unclear results because, honestly, we have no idea if anyone went back to adjust their answers. Too complicated — here are the results:
The Mario movie from 1993 was ...
- Okay (29,9%)
- Haven't seen it (28%)
- Fantastic (26,1%)
- Meh (9,7%)
- Terrible (6,3%)
The animated movie from 2023 was ...
- Fantastic (35,1%)
- Haven't seen it (30,3%)
- Okay (27,1%)
- Meh (5,8%)
- Terrible (1,6%)
About the Protagonists
We wrap up with the community’s fairly clear answer regarding the future of Mario, Peach, and Bowser: 34.8% want it to just keep going as it is. 20% are open to the idea of a bizarre love triangle, while 17.4% each think Bowser deserves a win or see our question as nonsense — and rightfully so. Only 10.3% think Peach should simply marry someone else.