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Born on the Game Boy, Part 3: The Birth of Wario

Marcel Pflug

4 days ago

3 min read

Think about how rare this is. A villain shows up for the first time in a handheld game, as the boss of a spin-off, and within a couple of years he has his own series, and within a decade he is one of the most recognisable characters the company owns. That is the strange, brilliant career of Wario, and it all began on the Game Boy. Part three of Born on the Game Boy is about the moment Mario's greedy shadow first appeared.

Game Boy Super Mario Land 2 6 Golden Coins cartridge and box — The game that introduced Mario's greedy shadow.

The villain who stole the show

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins arrived in 1992, again from Gunpei Yokoi's Nintendo R&D1, and it was a far more polished game than the odd little original, with bigger sprites and a whole map to explore at your own pace. But its lasting contribution was the antagonist. While Mario was away, a jealous rival had seized his castle and hypnotised the locals, and to reclaim his home Mario has to gather six golden coins and confront the usurper. That usurper was Wario, appearing for the very first time: a bloated, unshaven, yellow-and-purple mirror image of Mario, all appetite and spite.

The design is a small piece of genius. His name is a pun, joining the Japanese word for bad, warui, to Mario, and the W on his cap is simply Mario's M turned upside down. Everything about him is Mario inverted: where Mario is heroic and slim, Wario is greedy and hulking; where Mario rescues, Wario covets. He was created as the perfect adversary, and players took to him immediately, which set up the most unlikely promotion in Nintendo history.

Game Boy Super Mario Land 2 cartridge in the collection — Wario, all appetite and spite, in his first appearance.

From antagonist to antihero: Wario Land and Captain Syrup

Two years later, the villain got promoted. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 arrived in 1994 and, remarkably, handed the player control of Wario himself. He was no longer the obstacle but the star, an antihero motivated not by rescuing anyone but by pure treasure-hunting greed, out to gather enough gold to buy his own castle after losing Mario's. It was a bold move to build a game around a character's worst qualities, and it worked, giving Wario a personality distinct from Mario's and launching the long-running Wario Land series.

That first Wario Land also introduced his own recurring nemesis, Captain Syrup, the leader of a band of pirates whose stolen treasure Wario sets out to plunder. She gave Wario something Mario's villains rarely offered him, a rival on his own greedy terms, and she has returned in later Wario Land games as his signature foil. So the Game Boy did not just create Wario; it created the little rogues' gallery around him too.

Game Boy Wario Land Super Mario Land 3 cartridge — In Wario Land the villain became the star, opposite the pirate Captain Syrup.

From there Wario never stopped. The Wario Land games continued, and in 2003 he headlined something completely new, the frantic WarioWare series of microgames, which turned his loud, tasteless personality into a whole comic brand. Today he is a Mario Kart racer, a Smash Bros. fighter and the face of his own franchises, a long way from a handheld boss fight. Not bad for a character invented to be beaten at the end of a Game Boy game. To see these cartridges and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.