Gaming Oddities: Mario is Missing

Mario has appeared in a lot of different types of games, from platformers to sports games to even educational games. Many of his stranger games were published in the early 90s, when Mario was getting popular, but Nintendo wasn't fully sure about how to use him outside of the main series. One 1992 game stood out by virtue of having Mario take a backseat to his brother Luigi- Mario is Missing.

If you're familiar with Luigi, you'll notice that he hasn't had the best luck when it comes to starring roles in video games. Initially, he was only the second player character, although he was selectable in Super Mario Bros. 2- both The Lost Levels and the reskinned version of Doki Doki Panic. Eventually, as Mario games phased out the two-player mode, Luigi ended up appearing less and less, and often became the butt of jokes in some titles, before eventually getting a game series of his own. Of course, this game came out almost a decade before Luigi's Mansion, at a time when someone suspected it might be nice to have Luigi be the hero instead of the sidekick for a change. 

Unfortunately, the main problem is that the game isn't much fun to play. Luigi wanders around various cities, collecting various artifacts, and must return them to the places they were stolen from, answering questions about them on the way. The process of hunting down the artifacts is tedious busywork that doesn't teach anything and isn't at all fun.

As for the educational part, this wiki page has a list of all the factual inaccuracies contained in the game, which are the last thing you want in educational media. Some examples are as follows

• Bowser stealing unusually large historical artifacts, like the entire Sistine Chapel. This is a fair point, although the same thing often happens in Carmen Sandiego.
• A single theft closing down the entire location. They could justify the closure as being necessary to investigate the crime scene for clues, but it doesn't make sense for the attractions to stop functioning as tourist destinations
• Calling Francisco Franco, who'd killed hundreds of thousands of people, a "stuffy tyrant" is the understatement of the year.
• King Kong is featured a stolen historical relic for the Empire State Building, despite being fictional.

The list goes on, and includes various other factual inaccuracies of varying severity, from arguable nitpicking (saying the Emperor's Bell weighs 210 tons, rather than 202) to rather severe(saying no one was interested in San Francisco prior to the Gold Rush). It's possible that new information on some of these subjects may have come up since the game's 1992 release, but for the most part, the creators should have known better when writing these questions.

Throughout the game, there are boss battles, but the people responsible for making them missed the point, since it's impossible to get damaged. One of the interesting parts of requiring players to stomp on enemies is that a missed jump will damage you, but you don't need to worry about that when fighting enemies in this game. This is a recurring problem with educational games, which have to balance providing enough gameplay to be entertaining with teaching the material that they're  supposed to teach, and many can't do either very well.

Mario's early years had more than a few failed experiments, and while Mario is Missing is a rather poorly done video game, it had some good concepts, such as Luigi as the protagonist and the use of time travel. The fact that it fell flat is a shame, but we can take consolation in the fact that later games took the parts that had promise and helped them see their full potential.