Super Mario Galaxy

When Mario’s adventures escalated from Bros. to Land to World, the only direction left for an ambitious plumber was up into the stars. In Super Mario Galaxy, defeating Bowser means launching from planet to planet, pausing for just a moment in each Launch Star to wonder what pleasures and challenges await. 

The sheer joy of navigating Super Mario Galaxy’s varied, clever, and physics-defining planets to Mahito Yokota’s uplifting score is more than enough to satisfy Mario fans. And to casual players, brought into the hobby through the Wii phenomenon, Galaxy offered new delights beyond motion tennis and bowling. Yet the game also contains a surprisingly sophisticated hidden layer of Little Prince-esque melancholy, beautifully embodied by Rosalina and the Lumas. Director Yoshiaki Koizumi was so committed to the game's emotional core that he developed Rosalina’s heartwarming storybook at night and snuck it into the game without telling his boss, Shigeru Miyamoto.

In this critical and personal appreciation Super Mario Galaxy, Jordan Minor takes on a game that influenced his career as a games journalist, offered a chance to bond with his wife, and—after years of watching the game go unsupported on modern consoles—made him a believer in game preservation. Today, with a Switch 2 remaster and a new animated movie out in the world, Galaxy’s legacy has never been more certain.

Jordan Minor is a veteran entertainment and technology journalist. He is the author of the gaming history book VIDEO GAME OF THE YEAR: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since the early 1980s. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds three PhDs in game studies. Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm HNU, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.