If you were a child of the 2000s, you know just how frightening a single round of Mario Party can be.
Unofficially christened “the friendship killer,” the Mario Party series has become legendary for how the average game can drive friends to madness. In theory, it should just be a simple board game, but with all of the blind luck, games of skill, and just downright mean game design decisions made by Nintendo, the average game of Mario Party can lead to wonderful highs or range-inducing lows. Oddly enough, it’s how I bonded with my college friends, who have since become my second family. For our freshman year of college, we played Mario Party 1-4 every week and delighted in the chaos it brought. We had fun rules, like making the last board of the game a 50-turn match or having the person who rolled to go last greet the Domino’s delivery guy in his underwear. Even today, we still whip it out at parties to incite rage in each other.
But if you’re searching for the one version of Mario Party that is the most well-known for the chaos and pain it causes in its players, look no further than the original game. The very first Mario Party, which was released 25 years ago today, is a nasty piece of work that seems to actively hate you. Yes, you – the one reading this right now. It wants you to suffer and is designed in a way to inflict maximum punishment. And at the risk of being labeled a psychopath, I can’t deny that it’s my favorite game in the series, if only for how unabashedly depraved it is. The original Mario Party is the one I always recommend to our friend group to play, and while I’m aware I’m in the extreme minority on this one, allow me to explain why you all need to embrace the broken perfection that is Mario Party because make no mistake – Mario Party is a broken mess of a game.
If you’ve never played a game of Mario Party before, congratulations. It’s essentially a board game where players will travel around the board attempting to collect Stars. The person with the most Stars at the end of the game wins. To get a Star, you need to spend coins on it, and you can acquire said coins by landing on certain spaces or winning a mini-game at the end of the turn. Of course, it can’t be that easy, so not only can you land on spaces that make you lose coins, but there are spaces on the game board that can move you, make Bowser appear to punish any and all players, or even block off your path entirely to the Star, and that’s before getting into how other players can make your life a living hell. To make matters worse, you could play the game flawlessly, but at the very end, Bonus Stars are given out that could swing the game in your opponent’s favor. Mario Party is a harsh mistress, and that’s just describing the later games. The first game? It hurts to play. And no, that’s not hyperbole.
Let’s just get the negatives out of the way right now. Many of the boards in Mario Party are poorly designed, mostly due to forcing players into small sections of a map just because of bad luck. The worst examples of this are Luigi’s Engine Room and Wario’s Battle Canyon, levels where a player can lose the game simply because they never got anywhere close to a Star. Even if you got a Star, Bowser could easily just steal it from you simply because you walked past him. He could also steal coins from you, but then again, you could lose coins by losing minigames, too, a feat that is exclusive to this game, negating your progress even further. And just to add a little cherry on top, sometimes you can’t even make progress since if you land on an item space and have the misfortune of getting a Poison Mushroom, you automatically lose a turn. Too bad, so sad.
So yes, actually playing Mario Party can be an unpleasant experience. But gosh darn it, I love the pain that it causes! Most of the later games in the series feel so sanitized by comparison, doing whatever they can to try and assist players and give everyone an equal chance. It’s one of the reasons why I started to fall off the franchise in recent years. Take Super Mario Party as a prime example. Despite actually containing content from the first game in the series, because of all of the design decisions made to keep everyone on an equal playing field, such as reducing Bowser’s presence, making the boards smaller, offering a variety of bonuses that are randomized, and giving the worst player coins out of pity, everyone has a shot at winning when the game ends. But in my humble opinion, there’s something truly special about manipulating the system to your advantage in order to ensure your victory.
We have a rule in my friend group whenever anyone is playing a game with me – take out Jesse. It doesn’t matter what the game is – everyone should put forward all their effort into making sure I get last place, or else I will make sure I get first place somehow. Why is that? Because Mario Party taught me how to manipulate game mechanics to my advantage. Going back to Luigi’s Engine Room, the area that forces a player to go around in endless circles is toward the beginning of the stage. All a player needs to do to make someone’s life miserable is to pay the turnstile to face a certain direction within the first two or three turns, and one player is out of the running right away. Then I started to think that I could always go to the Star and spend my effort competing with other plays, but due to the variety of branching pathways, sometimes it’s more optimal to go to a Happening Space to cement that I would earn the Happening Star at the very end of the game. To the uninitiated, they may see the boards of Mario Party 1 as being unfair, but I see them as brilliant little examples of psychological warfare.
Of course, the game is more than just those two boards, and the first game in the series actually boasts eight boards, the most out of any entry in the series. All of these boards, despite their difficulty imbalances, are all bright and colorful, embodying the character the maps are based on perfectly. Peach’s Birthday Cake is a simple board that’s basically a giant loop that becomes more and more treacherous the longer the game goes on due to more opportunities to lose coins popping up the more laps are completed. Yoshi’s Tropical Island is similar, but the calm beach aesthetics do a lot to put the player at ease, especially when that board can also descend into anarchy when Bowser and the Star space swap so frequently.
And that’s before we even get to the minigames! For as much as people may praise Mario Party 2 as being the best game in the series, most players often forget that it reuses a large amount of minigames from the first Mario Party. Games like Bumper Balls, Face Lift, Crazy Cutter, Mushroom Mix-Up, and Bowl Over are just a few of the excellent games that were introduced in the first game that have been recycled by later entries. Then you have the infamous analog-rotating minigames that, while excruciating to play, are a blast to watch. When a player does win at one of these minigames, and it most certainly is possible, it almost always results in cheers and jubilation. A bad game wouldn’t elicit this much joy, and Mario Party can make people feel like they’re over the moon. Modern Mario Party games can give you tepid and mild reactions. The original game will make you feel like you’re on top of the world or subhuman.
Frankly, I’m surprised that Nintendo actually released the first game in the series on Nintendo Switch Online. The decision to rerelease Mario Party for modern audiences is a bold risk, especially given how those analog-rotating minigames posed a lot of problems for the Big N, but I tend to see the rerelease as Nintendo admitting that there’s something special about the first game in the series. Sure, people will say that Mario Party 2 and 3 are better games, and maybe from a balanced perspective, they’re right. You can play either of those two games and find more well-designed boards, more fair challenges, and game design that doesn’t hate you just because you exist.
But Mario Party 1 does, and that alone makes it unique in the series. It revels in the suffering of its players and you too will learn the joy in making others suffer for your own amusement. Yes, it may appear broken to those who don’t want to engage with it, but when you understand the intricacies of the game, then nothing else can compare. And when you have a group of people together who all think just like me and know how to exploit the unfair-level design, you have one of the most entertaining video games ever invented by humans. That or some new form of torture that should be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions – it’s frankly a toss-up at that point. So, cheers to the original Mario Party for turning 25 today! Your infamous legacy will live on in the minds of sadists like me for all time.
