Limit Break have posted up a family line chronicling Mario's nearly 30 years of appearances, starting as Jumpman in Donkey Kong Arcade back in 1981. The "tree" depicts how the Mario franchise has branched out over the years and where some of the concepts for the popular spin-offs stem from. For example, the Mario Kart series can be traced back to the Famicom Grand Prix F-1 Race game which was released in 1987, ages before Super Mario Kart was introduced. I seriously had no idea about some of the pre-SNES games' existence.

So I decided to do something crazy. Instead of writing an article, I thought it would be fun to do an infographic. This infographic takes a look at the Mario series by Nintendo, going through the beginning games that inspired the series and what spawned from there. Altogether there are over 130 Mario games included in a family line that spans almost 30 years. Needless to say, Nintendo has been busy in the baby makin' business (and I'm not just talking about Super Mario World 2). Anyways, enjoy the infographic.

EDIT: I see some people are wondering why I chose to make subsequent Mario series out to be siblings instead of descendants. For one, I wanted to portray the "first" game in the series as the father of all later versions of the game in the series. Second, if I had done it all as descendants instead, you'd be looking at a much, much bigger graphic that wouldn't be nearly as easy to follow. "Traditional" family line or not, it's a video game series people, not the lineage of a royal family.

McClubbin via limitbreak.gameriot.com »