Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 33 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 33rd issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone. 

Today, I will present my findings on how often each word appears in the titles of Mario franchise games, both in list and word cloud form.

Mario's Frequency Distribution

The amount of video games that can be reasonably called "Mario games" is immense. Even games where Mario is directly playable number in the hundreds; however, this is merely a part of what I call, and have been calling over my time as the writer of Supper Mario Broth, the "greater Mario franchise".

I have, on several occasions, already offered an explanation of it, however, here is a brief recap of what I consider the greater Mario franchise: all games that star Mario, Donkey Kong, Wario and Yoshi and characters introduced in those games (such as Luigi, Captain Toad, Diddy Kong, etc.) Few readers have taken issue with the inclusion of the Wario and Yoshi franchises due to Yoshi games sharing many characters (Kamek, Bowser, regular enemies) with Mario games and Wario debuting in Super Mario Land 2. However, Donkey Kong is generally considered slightly more removed from Mario as there are no direct character or location links between the Donkey Kong Country games and the mainline Mario games. However, my response to this is that as long as Nintendo considers Donkey Kong and other characters from his games fitting to appear on merchandise with the Mario label, they are all part of the greater Mario franchise:

So, considering all of these together, there must be an enormous amount of games, and with that, an enormous amount of names for those games. Anyone can probably imagine that if we were to count how often a word appears in the title of these games, "Mario" would be on top, followed likely by "Super" and "Bros.", but I believe it is worth the effort to actually create the frequency chart to see the distribution of these words in detail.

As most of this article will be consisting of text explaining how the frequency list was created, I will start off with an image that will hopefully provide a point of interest even for those readers who would not wish to know the details behind the methodology - a finished word cloud:

Here, the size of each word is proportionate to its rank in the frequency list, but not its number of appearances, as the most common word appears 144 times as often as the least common word and that representation would be entirely impractical to view. The bigger the word, the higher it is on the list of words sorted by their frequency.

The rest of the article will contain a discussion on how I chose the games for the list, as well as a representation of the frequencies in numerical form. On the bottom, there will be download links for text files containing the game list and the frequency list, so you may read them for yourself if you wish.

To start the preparation of the list of games, I have taken the list seen on the Super Mario Wiki here. Note that the list is extremely exhaustive, listing not only every single port of every relevant game for each platform which it appears on, but also content like flash games from Nintendo's various official web sites, ticket/coin redemption arcade machines, and games that are overwhelmingly unrelated to Mario but have a singular piece of Mario content, such as Punch-Out!! for the Wii, which has no Mario content during regular gameplay but features Donkey Kong as a boss in an unlockable bonus mode.

Taking the list in an unmodified form would be entirely useless for the creation of a frequency distribution due to an abundance of duplicate entries for various ports, particularly those of arcade games that have been ported to a large number of non-Nintendo consoles. For example, the page lists 30 instances of "Donkey Kong" due to it being the most widely-ported game in the franchise. Putting this raw information into a list would result in these words having an artificially inflated frequency count, belying their importance.

Thus, I have decided to not include more than one instance of the same name on the list. If a game is called "Mario Bros.", it can usually be assumed to be equivalent to any other game that is called "Mario Bros.", with minimal differences that have to do with the technical limitations of the console it is being played on. Of course, this presents some problems, as well. There are a few cases where two games have the same name but are completely different instead of being ports, such as the original Donkey Kong arcade and Donkey Kong for the Game Boy. Usually, the latter is referred to as "Donkey Kong '94" to distinguish it from the arcade; however, that is not its actual name - the game is just called "Donkey Kong". I have decided to not make exceptions and not make a separate duplicate entry for games like these in the list; although of course you may disagree. For these purposes, the list is provided below the article - you may then adjust it to your liking and produce your own lists and word clouds.

Then, there is the matter of whether games should be counted merely for including Mario content or having playable Mario series characters. I have decided against this; meaning that titles like the Super Smash Bros. series and Nintendo Land are not on the list despite being very relevant to the Mario franchise. The issue I have with these is that no matter how much Mario contain they include, they are fundamentally not about the Mario franchise; instead, they are compilations of various franchises. For this, I have referred to how the Zelda franchise handles appearances of Link in games like SoulCalibur II or Mario Kart 8 - these are also not considered Zelda series titles.

Furthermore, I have removed compilations and ports that have different names, but are fundamentally the same game, such as "Donkey Kong Classics", "Arcade Archives: Donkey Kong", and "Classic NES Series: Donkey Kong". Allowing them on the list simply because they have technically different names from "Donkey Kong" would just as much defeat the purpose as allowing all the copies of "Donkey Kong".

Some games, such as the Nintendo World Championships 1990 cartridge, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the NES Remix series, and Animal Crossing, contain excerpts of Mario games (in case of Animal Crossing, even entire copies of them, such as Wario's Woods). These were also not counted because they do not constitute what is usually considered a remake and are instead a special kind of port.

I have also not counted arcade games that are specifically centered around the redemption aspect, such as medal games. Finally, I have not counted any of the myriads of website flash games because while they fulfill any logical requirement one could make from a Mario game: they are video games released by Nintendo featuring and starring Mario characters, they are so many in number and so relatively unknown that they would drown out the Mario games that most players would actually be aware of and create a completely skewed frequency distribution.

With all these modifications done to the list, let us look at the most common words, prefixed by the amount of times they appear on the list:

144 Mario
49 Super
28 Donkey
28 Kong
18 Party
18 Bros
15 Land
14 Kart
13 the
11 Wario
10 Yoshi's
10 World
10 Mario's
9 WarioWare
9 Luigi
9 Golf
9 Dr.
8 Game
7 Tennis
7 Paper
7 New
7 DS
...(more can be seen in the text file in the attachment section)

We can immediately conclude that if we wanted to make the Mario game with the most generic title, it would have to be "Super Mario Party Bros.", or if including the Donkey Kong franchise, "Super Mario & Donkey Kong: Party Bros." Due to three different Land series existing: Super Mario Land, Wario Land and Donkey Kong Land, plus some extra uses, the word "Land" has 15 appearances in the list, beating out "Kart" with 14.

Interestingly, "Wario" appears only 2 times more than "WarioWare", which is emblematic of how WarioWare has become the de facto main series for him to appear in; given how the appearances of "Wario" are split between the Land series, spin-offs like Master of Disguise, and even Wario Blast: featuring Bomberman.

Note how there have been exactly twice as many Party games as Golf games, and exactly twice as many Kart games as Tennis games. Time will tell if these relationships continue in these proportions in the future, as well.

If you wish to create your own lists or tag clouds, see the files attached below. Here are the tools I used: Word Frequency Counter and Word Cloud Generator.

I hope this analysis of game titles could be informative.

Thank you very much for reading.