The Most Mario Colors

This may be the silliest post I’ve ever written.

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.

Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.

This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.

Every logo in this analysis adheres to the following criteria:

1. The title must be in the polygonal style
2. Mario’s name must be in the title
3. Mario’s name must be multicolor
4. The sequence of colors cannot be in rainbow order

Direct sequels that use the same sequence of colors are included, but re-releases are not. On that note, titles that were released on multiple platforms must have different logos and/or key art to have both included. (That means Mario Tennis on N64 and GBC are considered to be one logo.) Regional releases only count if each logo had a different sequence.

With that out of the way, here’s a list of 40 Mario games—in release order—showing which color was used for each letter in Mario’s name.

That question mark for Odyssey is because the O is a globe.

Here are some initial observations:

• Though the first two instances had a green M, it was used only once more, for Mario Tennis Aces in 2018.
• The most common color to be used twice in Mario’s name is green (17 times), followed by red (11 times).
• The first time any logo had five different colors was Super Mario Advance in 2001.

Let’s look at the total count per letter, per color to see what more we can learn.

• The letter M has almost always been red. (Makes sense.)

But—

• Green is the most common color overall, with a whopping 55 uses in 40 logos.
• Green is also the most consistent choice for any letter, with 70% coverage for the letter A.

Luigi supremacy!

• Violet is the least-used overall. (Waaah!!)
• Violet has never been used for A or R.
• Pink has never been used for M or A.
• Yellow has never been used for O.

Given this data, we can surmise the “most Mario” colors are:

Though these exact sequences do occur, surprisingly, there are other sequences that show up just as often. Let’s see how many times an exact color sequence was used.

Despite red being the most common color for the letter M, one of the most common sequences doesn’t have one. Most instances where the Mario logo begins with a blue M, it is this exact sequence. Notable examples of this sequence are Super Mario 64 and both Super Mario Galaxy titles.

Is this sequence in the running for the “most Mario”? Hard to say. Because another way to look at it is to find the most common sequence of the first four letters.

From this perspective, the red-green-yellow-blue sequence is a lot more common than blue-green-yellow-red, making it the clear winner. That’s also in line with the most common color per letter we deduced earlier. Here are the 10 titles with that sequence, representing a quarter of all these logos.

Some notes about this selection:

• Two Tennis games. Two Golf games. Two Rabbids games.
• The first with any of these sequences was 14 years ago.
• All of these games were released in a span of 11 years.
• Of these games, 9 out of 10 feature Peach on the box art. (Is that why pink is more commonly used lately?)

This sequence is used on three major franchise games, four sports games, two crossovers, and a Mario Party. All recent titles. Is this pattern, initially set by Super Mario 3D Land, the “most Mario” color sequence?

Let’s look at one more thing: The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Checks out!

Was this useful for me? For you? For anyone? Probably not. Has Nintendo done a similar analysis to help determine the coloration for the film logo? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just what Mario looks like lately.

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