Mario games in order: Release and story timeline

radiotimes.com:

We’ll preface this article by saying there are a lot of Mario games, and to make sense of the vaunted series, we have the Mario games in order of release.

We have two separate lists, one for the mainline entries and another that encompasses every game where Mario and his pals have shown up.

Also in this article, we’ll explain the situation with the Mario universe story and timeline, and how important it is to know before triple-jumping head-first into them.

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Some of the games are a bit more difficult to play than others, but we have included a way to purchase each mainline release.

Some can only be played on original hardware, too, but a good chunk of them can be had for the Nintendo Switch – and hopefully the Switch 2 when that releases, if it supports backwards compatibility.

If you aren't one of the hundreds of millions of Switch owners and the recent Mario movie has piqued your interest, there are great Switch deals to be had, and the Mario games make up some of the best games on the Switch.

There’s plenty to get into down below, so we shan’t delay – read on for a mega Mario marathon!

If you are hopping into the series now, we would recommend you play the mainline Mario games that are available natively on the Nintendo Switch, as these are the easiest to source and play right now.

There isn't much of an ongoing storyline to worry about, so we'd recommend you simply jump into these key titles at your leisure. The order doesn't really matter, but this is the sequence in which they came out on Switch:

Of those, we'd particularly recommend Wonder (a brilliant 2D platformer) and Odyssey (an awesome 3D platformer) if you're looking for a classic-feeling Mario experience