This is a little off-brand for me, but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about how much I love a really specific (unnamed?) style of Mario game box art, and it’d be stupid to start a whole different account for one post.

Look how awesome Super Mario Bros. 3 is! It’s like the whole game in a nutshell! Funny heroes, evil villains, goofy mooks, and a whole world to fly through. It’s pure magic.

Super Mario Land is no slouch either! This one breaks the formula a bit, depicting not just a mini-version of the entire world and its inhabitants, but all the different awesome things Mario can do!

Now here’s the game changer. It’s kind of cheating because this is the Japanese box art rather than the minimalist North American version, but look how fucking rad it is! The whole “micro version of the entire game world in one exciting image” concept is taken to the next level by depicting it as an entire mini-planet bursting with adventure! I am crazy about this idea and love whenever it pops up. Is there a name for this? I love this crap so much here’s another piece that I assume is from the Japanese instruction manual:

Look how gangster that Yoshi is! I really miss this more dinosaurish posture and build. This piece also gives us a different, albeit less detailed view of Dinosaur Land. It’s magic, guys.

That “whole planet of adventure” idea from World’s box art? Super Mario Land 2 takes it and flips it inside-out like it’s no big deal. Fucking awesome. Look how weird and interesting Land baddies are!

My boy Wario is kind of taking a step back for Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land’s art, but it doesn’t even matter because his world and frenemies are so delightfully weird.

OH MY GOOOOOOOOD. I think this is the one that got me thinking about all this in the first place. It helps that the game was practically a religious experience for me. The box art is great, but the real champion is this slightly different piece, which I think was in the game manual somewhere:

MARIO TAKE ME AWAY WITH YOU TO YOUR WORLD OF WACKY ADVENTURE AND DIVERSE BIOMES

2000′s Wario Land 3 is a little different: more mysterious and even kind of lonely, which fittingly reflects the odd story of the game. The clay visuals from (some of) Wario Land 2′s promo art makes a comeback, which really makes Wario’s snowglobe/music-box world pop.

Holy shit SPAAAAAACE! Released in 2007, it had been a long time since we last saw some kick-ass Mario art in this style. Like the game itself, Galaxy’s art takes ideas from Mario 64 and launches them into beautiful, star-splattered orbit. These games aren’t a cohesive world in a box, they’re an entire galaxy.

3 years later, Galaxy 2 put Yoshi back in the equation (albeit the big-nosed, baby-bodied version of him that Nintendo insists on), and presents a sunnier, livelier universe than its predecessor. Galaxy 1′s box is prettier and more striking, but Galaxy 2′s is more in line with the earlier examples that I love so much.

The Mario games before and since have charming box art too (in particular the colorful cartoon chaos of the original Super Mario Bros.), but they don’t quite capture that feeling of a living, breathing, cartoon world full of adventure being magically contained in the cartridge like these do. The combo of exaggeratedly large hero art and exaggeratedly tiny enemy and world art seems to be the secret, and it’s a super potent one. With digital distribution changing how we buy games and Nintendo’s push for homogeneity in Mario’s art design, we probably won’t see promo art like this again any time soon. Bummer.