Super Mario Galaxy

About

Super Mario Galaxy is a series in the Super Mario series. It is mainly a 3-D adventure game starring Mario (and Luigi at a certain point in the game), who as usual must rescue Peach from the clutches of Bowser. There is only two games from the Super Mario Galaxy series: Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2. It is also the first appearance for the character Rosalina, would go on to be a staple of multi-player Nintendo party games.

History

Super Mario Galaxy is the first game in the Super Mario series for the Nintendo Wii. ^[1] It was directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto and Shakao Shimizu. The game notably makes use of spherical platforming, with Mario running around orbs such as planets and meteors. The technology to make this possible took three months to develop. The game was announced at E3 2006 (trailer shown below).

Reception

The game was released in various global markets in November of 2007. The game was a massive critical success, gaining a rating of 97/100 on Metacritic.^[2] It received Game of the Year awards from several publications, including Kotaku, Nintendo Power, Yahoo Games, and more. The game also sold extremely well, moving over 350,000 units in its first two weeks in Japan, and has sold over 2.5 million units worldwide since 2007.

Online Presence

Online, the game has generated a strong fandom, most notably on Facebook, where it has over 445,000 likes.^[3]

Let's Play

The game has been featured in several Let's Play videos. Notably, Game Grumps played the game on their channel, with the first episode gaining over 3.5 million views (shown below, left). YouTuber JoshJepson also played the game on his channel, with his first episode gaining over 440,000 views (shown below, right).

Fan Art

Related Memes

So… Chunks, Huh

So… Chunks, Huh? refers to a line from Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy in which a penguin approaches Mario and says "So… chunks, huh?", referring to the in-game collectibles known as star bits. In the summer of 2017, it became a minor meme on Tumblr.

The above GIF was posted to Tumblr on January 15th, 2016 by sonysportswalkman and gained over 23,000 notes. According to Meme Documentation, the genesis for the phrase becoming a Tumblr meme was a text post from August 4th by sweetbabyraysgourmetsauces that reads "plap plap plap plap So… chunks, huh? plap plap plap plap." The post has over 20,000 notes.

U R MR GAY

U R MR GAY refers to a coincidental quirk in the lettering that appears in the title of Super Mario Galaxy. Certain letters in the title are adorned with sparkles. In order, these letters are U, R, M, R, G, A, and Y. Considering "U" and "R" to be abbreviations for "you" and "are" and splitting the letters into words appropriately, there appears to be a hidden message of sorts telling the viewer, "you are Mr. Gay".

YA I M R U?

While the lettering in Super Mario Galaxy 2's title was styled identically to the first game, as Kotaku reported, there appeared to be no way to find another accidental message. However, as covered by Destructoid and The Escapist, some people noticed that looking at the letters in reverse yielded another message that could be seen as a response to the statement "you are Mr. gay".

In some versions of the title lettering for the second game, the letters with sparkles are, in reverse order, Y, A, I, M, R, and U. The supposed message here is even more abbreviated than the first; "YA I M R U?" could be read as "Yeah, I am, are you?"

Puzzle Plank Galaxy MADs

Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Japanese: かくざいもくざいギャラクシー, Kakuzai Mokuzai Galaxy) refers to a series of MAD videos utilizing an audiotrack "Square Timber" in Super Mario Galaxy 2[, the 4th original 3D action game in the Super Mario series released by Nintendo. This song has been one of the well-used musical resources for MAD videos on the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND) since 2012.

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External References

^[1] Wikipedia – Super Mario Galaxy

^[2] Metacritic – Super Mario Galaxy

^[3] Facebook – Super Mario Galaxy