Impressive though these statistics and litany of allusions are, they can at most establish the truth of Mario’s popularity. Pressed to explain “why?,” they fail to yield compelling answers. Why should Mario, an “average Joe” if there ever was one, have achieved greater fame than Donkey Kong, the eponymous antagonist in Mario’s debut? How is it that Mario, whose vocational history (plumbing, carpentry, sanitation, etc.) hardly lends itself to world-saving antics, has established himself as the spokesman for an entire medium?

The “secret” to Mario’s popularity lies in his profound average-ness, which allows him to easily adapt to virtually any context. More than once, I’ve heard Mario referred to as a video-game “Ur-Symbol.” This prefix isn’t idle, and helps explain why Mario first garnered and has maintained such cultural power.

Depending on what etymology you accept, “Ur-” is derived from the Sumerian metropolis of the same name, whose recurrent appearance in Western philosophy testifies to the ancient city’s central role in European myth-making, as well as its tremendous conceptual flexibility. When Hegel laid out his teleology of human civilization, he modeled history as a Western tide that originated in the “Near East” but settled on the shores of Europe—Ur to Rome, in other words. The appeal of Ur, in this sense, lies in its evocation of a primal moment, distant enough to be irrefutable but still capable of relevance in changing cultural contexts.

Paradoxically, the Ur-symbol is both eternal and protean. It can be assigned a variety of traits without losing its distinctness. Its qualities are not internal, but external: It means what we need it to. The most famous manifestation of the Ur-symbol is likely the image of Jesus Christ, which has proved an endlessly adaptable anchor of an imagined spiritual community. In his own way, Mario has become a gaming Ur-symbol: His continued relevance through nearly every major paradigm shift in the medium’s history—arcade to console, two dimensions to three, subcultural hobby to ubiquitous pastime—attests to Mario’s unparalleled ability to remain relevant in an ever more heterogeneous community of players and games.

Consider the cast of recurring characters—Peach, Luigi, Bowser, etc.—that accompany (or antagonize) Mario in games set in the Mushroom Kingdom. Though many have starred in their own titles, the identity of each is typically constructed in terms of their relationship to Mario: Luigi is Mario’s brother, Peach, Mario’s lover, Wario, Mario’s anti-hero, and so on. When we call supporting characters’ own titles spin-offs, we acknowledge that there’s something off which they are spinning: that something is, of course, Mario.

In this sense, social life in the Mushroom Kingdom is centered on and around Mario. By extension, the narratives derived from these relations can never escape Mario’s influence, whether or not he is present. And because of the center-periphery relationship between Mario and his acquaintances, games (WarioWare, Inc., Luigi’s Mansion, etc.) that center on any other character than Mario inevitably have a sense of novelty about them.