Mario is quite the sportsman. Over the years he’s proven himself more than capable at playing tennis, golf, baseball, football, basketball, and almost every Olympic and Winter Olympic sport at a professional level. Its really very impressive that a full-time plumber, carpenter, doctor, boxing referee, and Koopa murderer even has the free time to learn the rules of all these sports.
However, there is one sport that I have always felt would be the perfect fit for the Italian – the gentleman’s game, rugby union. The inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom have taken to the rugby pitch to play sevens at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, but they’ve never gotten to play traditional rugby.
They say rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes and what series has more characters of varying body types than Mario? Depending on which fan wiki you ask, there are somewhere around 700 unique named characters in the Mario universe and between all of them you can fill out several well-balanced teams of backs and forwards. It’s all rather obvious; Luigi and Daisy on either wing, Donkey Kong would make a robust number eight, a half-back pairing of Toad at nine and Mario at ten would be deadly, Bowser and King Boo are props if I have ever seen two, Wario is obviously a hooker, any of the Koopa kids have the strength to operate in the second row, with Rosalina and Pauline have the height to be great wing-forwards, Yoshi and Birdo would make great centres and Waluigi clearly is a fullback who doesn’t do much but will take all the glory come try time.
It even works once you get to the officials and coaching staff. F.L.U.D.D. is a literal waterboy, Goombas and Shy Guys will fill any stadium, Doctor Mario would make a handy physio, Lakitu is happy to be the referee, Kamek is basically Eddie Jones and Doctor E. Gad is Rassie Erasmus (no, I will not elaborate either of those). But I think everyone likes the idea of their favourite sport being brought into the Mushroom Kingdom, so what makes rugby a more deserving fit than others?
A big part of it is cultural, Japan is the home of Mario and more importantly Camelot, the developer of most Mario sports games. But rugby has been growing in Japan faster than any other country for the last decade. It’s the only country that any rugby fan would argue has made a successful jump from being a tier two, semi-professional team to tier one side that could beat any other top team on a given day since Argentina in the late ‘00s.
There’s a huge overlap in gamers and rugby, especially in Japan. During this year’s summer test Uruguay, every time there was a TMO referral the stadium organisers would play the Super Smash Bros. menu music. The next month during the team’s thrilling series against France they played music from The World Ends With You during water breaks.
You also can’t tell me there isn’t a market for this. We get annual triple-A ice-hockey and baseball games despite those sports only really being cultural mainstays in the US and Canada and Japan and US respectively. Rugby is constantly growing, and it helps that a bunch of the fans and players are massive nerds. Harlequins wing Louis Lynagh recently talked about his love for Call of Duty, Ellis Genge has played League of Leagues against an esports team and Irish ex-international, Mike Ross, was briefly a competitive Titanfall 2 player.
I also can’t help but wish for more diversity in arcade sports games. For the last 20 years it feels like we have had wacky spins on football and golf coming out of our ears, with an occasional over-the-top basketball game. I love the zaniness of What The Golf, Cursed to Golf, and Golf Story but for the love of god, it would be nice to see some other sports turned into video games.
Ever since the NFL started distancing itself from games like NFL Blitz, we have had fewer and fewer weird sports games. Maybe that’s something got to do with these organisations wanting to distance themselves from over-the-top violence in an era when the very real physical element and repercussions of these sports is being more thoroughly scrutinised. But there’s so much fun you could do with an arcade rugby game; kicks that break the laws of physics, set plays off of scrums and line-outs involving power-ups, flag poles instead of goal posts, banana peels being thrown out during place kicks, stadiums in the different worlds for Mario or a mini-game where Waluigi can see how much he can back chat to the ref before being sent off.
Ok, yes, the only reason I am writing this is because rugby is the sport I happen to follow and so of course I think it deserves to be Mario-ified. But more importantly, Mario is a franchise with almost no rules on it, he was worked every job, visited every type of land and Ubisoft even gave him a gun. Let him play more sports and let him break the rules while he does.
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