Mario is still a record-breaking superstar as Super Mario Bros. turns 40

The best-selling videogame franchise of all time turns 40 this weekend!
So let’s celebrate Mario’s amazing records as his best-selling series marks four decades on sale.
Tomorrow is set to be a super day, as it marks the anniversary of the release of a very significant videogame: Super Mario Bros.. This predominant platformer first came out on 13 September 1985 in Japan.
It's hard to overstate how significant Mario, the world’s most famous plumber, is to the world of gaming in general. The Super Mario games have dominated our digital playgrounds for decades, and the upshot is that it’s the best-selling videogame series of all time.
All told, the many Super Mario games and their spin-offs have sold more than 890 million copies – and Mario shows no signs of slowing down, since that figure doesn’t even include sales of the Switch 2’s launch games Mario Kart World (2025).
Super Mario Bros. may be the first Super Mario game, but it wasn’t actually Mario’s first appearance. That accolade goes to Donkey Kong, where Mario was tasked with saving Pauline from the titular tie-wearing terror. He’s now a reformed Ape, however, and Donkey Kong had his own new adventure with Pauline earlier this year in Donkey Kong Bananza.
Super Mario Bros. isn’t just a platformer for Mario himself, though – it serves as a jumping off point for others to becoming Officially Amazing, too!
For as long as the game has existed, people have been battling it out to claim the record for fastest completion of Super Mario Bros..
A gamer known as average11 (USA) took the title in August with a time of just 4 minutes 54.515 seconds.
They beat speedrunning streamer extraordinaire Niftski (USA) by mere milliseconds. He had done it in 4 min 54.565 seconds to beat records he had set previously.
Many games in the Super Mario series have a thriving speedrunning community, with Super Mario 64 being the most speedrun videogame of all time, according to Speedrun.com’s figures. An astonishing 48,543 players have attempted to get through the first 3D Super Mario game as quickly as possible.
You can find impressive speedrunning records scattered throughout the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2026, as well as four bumper pages with more amazing Super Mario facts and figures.
Although the first entry in Nintendo’s super-star Super Mario series is the one in the spotlight today, Mario has a lot of world records tucked in his plumber’s belt! Get your copy of Gamer’s Editon 2026 now if you want to discover some more of them.