Celebrate Mario Day with these Super Mario record breakers including an iconic speedrun

Happy Mario Day! That’s right, though 10 March isn’t an anniversary for everyone’s favourite videogame plumber per se, Nintendo set it aside to give him his ups (his 1ups, get it?). 10 March, you see, can be otherwise written as Mar 10, which looks a bit like “Mario”. 

Mario’s first appearance was actually as the protagonist of the original Donkey Kong arcade machine in 1981, which was the first platformer videogame. Mario was called Jumpman at the time, and in the almost 45 years since he’s picked up not only a new name, but legions of fans – some of whom celebrate him by becoming Officially Amazing gamers. 

The Mario series, including all the games and spinoffs, has sold at least 907.7 million units, making it still comfortably the best-selling videogame series in the world. 14.03 million of those units come from Mario Kart World (Nintendo, 2025), the best-selling Switch 2 game. (The original Switch, by the way, has sold 155.37 million units, meaning it’s close to unseating the PlayStation 2 as the best-selling videogame console of all time). 

Mario Kart World on Nintendo Switch 2

Audrey Mina (Japan) must have been pleased that the Super Mario series has a lot of games to pick from, since it surely kept her record-breaking marathon fresh. From 2-5 May 2025 she spent 60 hours 17 minutes 58 seconds playing them, officially earning the title of the longest videogame marathon playing games in the Super Mario series.

While Audrey spent a long time gaming, others compete to play Mario’s games for as little time as possible. The most speedrun videogame is Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996). As of 12 June 2025, 49,013 speedruns were logged for it on Speedrun.com, more than any other videogame. 

And, in a massive coup for the speedrunning world, on 18 December 2025 the speedrunner “averge11” (USA) broke the record for the fastest completion of Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), with an incredible time of just 4 minutes 54.415 seconds. 

averge11 snatched the crown from, er, averge11. He’d previously managed to finish the game in 4 minutes 54.515 seconds, beating previous champ Niftski’s (USA) time of 4 minutes 54.565 seconds. As you can see, the margins are razor thin now, and we’re very close to seeing a mathematically perfect playthrough of Super Mario Bros..

Though it’s the more famous game, Super Mario Bros. isn’t actually the first appearance of Luigi, Mario’s younger brother. He first popped up in Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1983) on the Game & Watch device. Mario is still very much the star, though; there’s even a record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Mario, set on 18 August 2010. 230 fans dressed as the heroic Italian in Red Star Macalline Home Furniture Shopping Mall in Chifeng City, China.

Still, the siblings have proven to be a smash hit as a pair, with fans turning out in their droves to make The Super Mario Bros. Movie (USA, 2023) the highest-grossing movie based on a videogame. Between its release on 5 April 2023 and 19 February 2025 it took in over $1.3 billion (£1.07 billion). 

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The next Mario movie is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (USA), set to release soon on 1 April. It’s based on the 2007 Nintendo game Super Mario Galaxy, which was the most critically acclaimed Mario videogame until Super Mario Odyssey came along in 2017. It garnered a 97 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic, with 56 out of 114 reviews being perfect 10s.

But Super Mario Galaxy is still a firm favourite, and Mario shows no signs of slowing down. Will the new movie bring out more fans and break its predecessor’s record? What kind of records will Mario inspire before the next Mario Day? We’ll be here to find out. Let’s-a-go!