Discussion Those great Mario artworks from Game & Watch Gallery

[Gingerbread Man]

From 1997 to 2002, Nintendo remade various Game & Watch games for GB, GBC, and GBA as part of the Game & Watch Gallery series. These titles featured Mario characters in various roles, so you have Bowser casually causing havoc in a garden, Mario and Luigi in a cookie factory, Wario defending a giant statue of himself from Bullet Bills... We don't normally see this in mainline Mario games (nor in spin-offs), yet the crew was perfectly "on-character". I always felt these short adventures were what the Mario crew was up to between one game and another.

And were che character artworks gorgeous! They have a sort of "classic" feeling. While on other titles, everyone was modern and 3D, the Game & Watch Gallery line preserved the classic Kotabe-style artworks. In fact, this was the last bastion of Classic Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., and various characters from Yoshi's Island had a cameo here and there (not to mention Yoshi's Cookies!).

MarioWiki has galleries for GWG 1, 2, 3, 4.

I believe WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven have sort of supplanted the Game & Watch Gallery series -- after 4 titles, most of the great games were remade, and Wario and Rhythm are a "modern take" on the Game & Watch formula. But this cozy, and a bit nostalgic, portrayal of the Mario characters has been sorely missing ever since. Only the 2020 Game & Watch Super Mario Bros. came close (ironically, another G&W-related title!).

 

[Zalman]

Such an underrated series of games. I have a soft spot for G&WG2 especially. This is my favorite artwork:

 

[Mer.Saloon]

The game and watch gallery games are awesome to this day. They take the premise of preserving and documenting the G&W games and on top of that remix and revamp them.

But dang are they hard.