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ExploreFor over 30 years, one name in gaming has been the most universally lauded and recognized: Mario, or Super Mario. Since it was first released for Nintendo in 1985, the Super Mario franchise has gone on to sell over 300 million copies of its games to make it the best selling video game series in history. One would be hard pressed to find anyone on the planet who has ever played a video game that hasn’t played, or at the very least heard of, the Super Mario series.
The latest in the Mario series is Super Mario Odyssey, which was released for Nintendo Switch in October, 2017. The game is a return to the open-world “sandbox” style last seen in Super Mario sunshine. Odyssey has sold over 10 million copies and is the best-selling game on Switch. It has also received rave reviews from all of the top video game ranking websites on the internet.
The success of Odyssey has also seen some of the longstanding mysteries and questions from the Mario franchise resurface. This includes queries such as, “Why does Mario have nipples but no belly button?” and “Is Toad’s head a hat or a head?” In a recent video, Odyssey producer Yoshiaki Koizumi replied to wondering minds.
“Well to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really expect that to be a topic among fans,” he said. “Once I heard that people were talking so much about Mario’s belly button, it made me start to think about whether we should revisit the topic on the design side.” In response to the questions about Toad’s head, Koizumi had this to say: “So that, as it turns out, is actually Toad’s head,” he said, “I’m going to have to leave it to all of you to figure out exactly how that works out. Maybe there’s something inside…”
See more of what Koizumi had to say here:
So while Koizumi didn’t fully answer all of the pressing Super Mario questions, he did shed some light on some of the franchise’s great mysteries. And while you ponder why exactly Mario has nipples and no belly button, you can take a look at some of our best Mario t-shirts:
Super Mario T-Shirts
