It just occurred to me: of all the video games series, I think Mario is the one that the greatest amount of human intellectual effort has been spent on. In general Mario seems to dominate the speedrunning and challenge-running communities (stuff like the SM64 A-button challenge), and the amount of thought and effort that has gone into understanding how these games work and playing them optimally with respect to certain objectives is just astounding. And then on top of that there's SMW romhacking. I don't know, it's possible more time and effort has been spent on some kind of esports game (Starcraft?), but I'm not sure. Mario is definitely among the top contenders. And as someone who is, you know, something of a Mario fan and also something of a human ingenuity fan, this makes me really happy. Mario is, frankly, Serious Business these days. And I think that's cool.