10 Hilariously Bad Super Mario Rip-Offs
It's-a Me, Mario! No... wait... it's something else. Something really bad, but Mario-ish...
Mario is one of the oldest and most well-known video game mascots of all time, and he's also one of the most popular and best-selling. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, though he technically didn't have a name at the time, and was retroactively called "Jumpman," though this would change.
By 1982's Donkey Kong Junior, Jumpman had evolved into Mario, and he's been a turtle-stomping Italian plumber ever since. The character has developed into a massive franchise filled with support characters, more games than any other franchise, and he's even been the protagonist in one of the worst movies ever made.
To put it simply, Mario is money, and Nintendo has been reaping the benefits of its creation for four decades, but that comes with some problems. When you're hot, your competitors are going to try and take advantage, and they've been doing it for almost as long as Mario has been a thing.
Knock-off games that misappropriated Mario's pixels are constantly showing up in games on all sorts of devices. This has mostly gone away as Nintendo rose to become one of the biggest players in the gaming industry, but there are hundreds of terrible clones out there with these ten taking the lead as the worst Mario rip-offs ever made.
10. Mario 16
Sometimes, a rip-off takes characters from one game and drops them into a bad approximation of another, and that's what you have with Mario 16. The game is actually a hack of Joe & Mac that was released on the Famicom back in 1993 with a re-release following three years later.
The game looks like an amalgamation of both games, but it doesn't look right due to the fact that all the Mario sprites were ripped out of Super Mario Bros. 3, and their colors look completely out of place. Essentially, Joe's sprites were swapped with Mario's, and it's all out of place.
Almost everything else in the game is identical to its original sprites, so this is little more than a strange hack-job that somehow found life on a legit Nintendo system. The gameplay is altered a little bit, as Mario starts off with ten lives instead of his usual three.
There's a different hack of this game called Mario Super Jurassk Park (That's not a typo on my part, that's how it's spelled on the cart). The title screen has the misspelled Jurassic Park logo in place of Mario, though Mario's head is altered and sitting where the "16" is in the original hack.