Mario’s never been a stranger to sports. But during the Nintendo GameCube era, the popular Italian plumber seemed more familiar scoring points on a field or court than he was jumping from platform to platform.
While there’s no shortage of fantastic sports spin-offs starring Mario and his Mushroom Kingdom friends, one of them reigned supreme for the pure fun factor. In 2005, Super Mario Strikers saw Mario finally taking to soccer, one of the few sports he hadn’t yet conquered, creating one of the most timeless pick-up-and-play experiences in all of gaming.
Like any great Mario sports game, Strikers is focused squarely on taking the real-life, high-stakes actual sport and making it an approachable good time that anyone can enjoy. Strikers turns the 11-on-11 sport into a more readable five-on-five affair starring all the familiar friendly (and not so friendly in the case of Wario and Waluigi) faces you’d expect from a Mario game. Players pick a team captain and fill out the rest of their team with thematic minions like Koopas and Toads.
Super Mario Strikers was strangely aggressive for a first-party Nintendo release, even in the 2000s.
Similar to Mario Baseball and Power Tennis before it, Strikers also adds a handful of goofy items meant to add an element of unpredictability and randomness to a game. From banana peels that trip players up to Chain Chomps that endlessly pursue whoever has the ball, these items make an otherwise by-the-numbers affair into a Mario Kart-like party game.
Every selectable captain has also had a Super Strike, a powerful shot that, if landed, counts as two points instead of one. Pulling off a Super Strike is incredibly tricky, but immensely rewarding if you can pull it off perfectly.
Once on the field, Strikers is much deeper than its simplistic control scheme would have you believe. By smoothing over the more complex parts of the sport and making it a more intimate competition than, say EA’s FC series, setting up picks and plays becomes a much more natural part of the game. Even as someone without any prior knowledge of the sport, I was able to compete with friends who eat, sleep, and breathe the world’s game. It’s another stellar example of how Nintendo has always maintained approachability without sacrificing depth.
I don’t know what possessed Waluigi to tell spectators to “suck it,” but it's still funny two decades later.
But what truly makes Strikers so memorable is its oddly aggressive tone. Everything from the game’s line-heavy box art to the industrial nature of its stadiums feels more angsty than your typical Nintendo game. Successful Super Strikes toss opposing team members aside frivolously. The edges of the many soccer fields you play on feature an electric fence that harms those who dare step out of bounds. Defensive maneuvers are overtly aggressive and wouldn’t look out of place in a Super Smash Bros game. This series is where the infamous Waluigi crotch-chop originates, a window into the general non-Nintendo vibe this game has.
The developer of Strikers is none other than Next Level Games, the team that previously worked on the violent arcade hit NHL Hitz and the PlayStation 2 cult-classic Sega Soccer Slam. Both of these sports games are memorable for cartoonishly over-the-top, and in the case of NHL Hitz, borderline offensive. While Strikers is significantly dialed down compared to those games, it's clear that the team’s signature touch somehow made it through Nintendo’s family-friendly brand guidelines.
In hindsight, it was a blessing. Strikers’ over-the-top approach helped set the series apart from Mario’s many other sports game. When the sequel, the excellent Mario Strikers Charged, was released in 2007, it was clear that Next Level was allowed to double down on what made the first so distinct.
While the last Strikers game didn’t reach the same highs as the first two, it doesn’t erase the fact that the very first game managed to make Nintendo’s longest ongoing trend feel fresh in an unexpected way. Earlier this year, Strikers was added to Nintendo Switch Online as a GameCube classic. And booting it up 20 years later proved just how excellent Mario’s first time on the pitch turned out.
