#explorer mario

Long time Super Mario fans will be aware that the original mythos played like this: Mario was a carpenter/plumber from Brooklyn who owned a pet ape, had to save his girlfriend from that ape, then abused that ape until its son beat him up.  Later, while at work in the sewers, he and his brother Luigi got lost and fought a bunch of crabs until they emerged into a magical kingdom where they had to save a princess from a dragon.

Of course, Nintendo later gently retconned this story with the first Yoshi’s Island game, which implied that Mario and Luigi had always been in the Mushroom Kingdom.  But fans never forgot the original tale, and most websites detailing the history will try to reconcile the two versions.

Now, however, it appears that Nintendo might be doing the reconciling for us.

As already detailed in a GameXplain video (~14:30 at https://hooktube.com/watch?v=8e53zdoadv0), the original scene of the original Donkey Kong arcade game, released back in 1981, appears in the background of a scene set in New Donk City.  There are references to various Kongs throughout that level.  We also know that the mayor of NDC is Mario’s Brooklyn girlfriend, Pauline.  And if you watch the reveal trailer it even begins with Mario emerging from, you guessed it, a sewer.

Did he go back through the pipes to his native home?

While getting back to the roots of the Mario character provides the most tantalizing possibilities, we’ve seen that the game is drawing from all parts of Mario’s history as well.  We see the lion from the Super Mario Land series, previously a red-headed stepchild of the franchise, playing a role in Odyssey.  And there are outfit changes that call back to numerous Mario spin-offs.

Are all of these simply references for the sake of references, or is Nintendo playing at a bigger picture?  Are they drawing from the past because a monumental change to the franchise’s mythos and canon is about to take place?