Wario


 * For fighter info, see Wario (SR).

Wario (ワリオ) is a character from the Mario series, who eventually became popular enough to spawn his own side-franchise. He has made several small cameos in the first two Super Smash Bros. games, and has been made a full playable character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Character description
When Nintendo's very first handheld system, the Game Boy, launched in 1989, Gunpei Yokoi's Super Mario Land launched with it. Mario's 8-bit adventure was so successful that one year later, a sequel arrived. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins takes place directly after the first game, when Mario comes home after defeating the evil alien Tatanga. When he arrives, he discovers that his castle has been taken over by his antagonistic, greedy counterpart, Wario, and he must retrieve the 6 Golden Coins hidden around the land to get his home back. In the final showdown, Wario was revealed to look very much like Mario himself, except fatter, slightly shorter, and with a big, bulbous nose that had a jagged, pointy mustache jutting out of it. In a three-part battle, Wario uses the same power-ups that Mario had access to throughout the game, and adds his own abilities to the mix. Wario charges at his opponent with his shoulder, and crashes to the floor butt first, which become staple moves for the character in future games. When conquered by Mario, he reverted to a "tiny" form, and escaped out the window to search for better treasures.

And search for them he did, as he landed a starring role in the third game in the series, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. It takes place directly after 6 Golden Coins, in which Wario sets out to earn as much gold as humanly possible, so he can buy his own castle and rub it in Mario's goody-goody face. This game played differently than the first two games, because Wario brought his own style with him. Instead of deploying acrobatics like Mario, Wario relied on his brute strength, and the ability to sport various hats that gave him different powers, such as a dragon hat that spewed fire. He also gained his own villain in this adventure, the equally greedy Captain Syrup, who captured a Genie to use for her own selfish purposes. By the end of the quest, Wario gives both Syrup and the Genie a sound thrashing, and pays the Genie to grant him his castle.

After antagonizing Mario and his friends yet again in games such as Wario's Woods and Mario and Wario, Wario continued to have three more adventures on various Game Boy platforms. In Wario Land II, Wario experiences a case of bad karma when Captain Syrup kicks him out of his own castle and steals it. Wario Land 3 involves Wario doing his first (slightly) unselfish deed, saving the inhabitants of a music box from the devious Rudy the Clown- on the condition that he gets to keep all the treasure that he earned along the way. In Wario Land 4 he does what Mario had been doing for the last decade beforehand and rescues a princess. Through these games, Wario eventually evolved from the classification of "villain" and earned the title of "anti-hero".

After all these platforming escapades, Wario, now sporting biker gear as opposed to a yellow and purple version of Mario's duds, notices the boom of the video game industry, and decides to take advantage of this craze by forming his own game company. Due to his short attention span, instead of creating a single game of reasonable length, he opts to make over two hundred games, each of them a mere five seconds long. Too short to even be called "minigames", they were dubbed "microgames". Finally, since he was too lazy to make all these games himself, he hires a handful of his fellow residents of Diamond City to do his dirty work for him, among them the feisty multi-talented Mona, and the Nintendo superfan 9-Volt. Thus, the Wario Ware franchise was born.

As if having two of his own series of games wasn't enough, Wario has also made appearances in a great number of Mario spin-offs, including the Mario Kart and Mario Party games, as well as a great plethora of Mario sports titles. In these titles, Wario is no longer evil, but more of a bumbling comic relief. His rumored brother bent on bothering Mario's brother, Luigi, is soon revealed, being named Waluigi.

Due to Wario's popularity, he has been chosen as one of the newcomers in the latest addition to the Super Smash Bros. franchise, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Instead of being added as yet another Mario character, Wario enters the arena representing the Wario Ware franchise, as shown by his biker uniform.