October 2, 2006

My Nintendo Top 10 minus 5

At work I started trying to put together a Top 10 of the most popular Nintendo Characters of all time. I really wanted to find characters that had begun on the Classic NES and continued to be successes on each Nintendo platform. What we found when trying to do a top 10 was that it began looking like a Who’s Who for the Super Mario franchise, so after some thoughtful consideration I trimmed it down to a Top 5 and left it at that. It’s a pretty easy list, but for what it’s worth:


5) Donkey Kong
One of the classics, I’d say the only reason old DK is not higher on the list is that this was a popularity contest, and kids these days just ain’t what they used to be.

4) Samus Aran
If you don’t recognize the name it’s probably because you’ve referred to our heroine only by her franchise name, Metroid. Since it’s inception on the classic NES there has been a popular Metroid game on all (or most all) Nintendo platforms. Samus is that female bounty hunter you get to play.

3) Link
Again, you may only know this character by franchise. But, altogether the Zelda name has made this little guy one of the most welcome character on any Nintendo screen. One of the most demanded names in all video-game-dom (sorta opinionated, but I still just put him at 3 since our next 2 are probably way more popular as far as house-hold names go).

2) Pikachu
To my surprise those little “Gotta Catch ‘em All” Pokémon were the brain-child of our good friends at Nintendo. And with the popularity of the franchise as a whole I’d say you could walk into any K-8 public/private school in the US, maybe even the world, and have at least half of the students who are very friendly with our mild mannered little yellow pocket monster.

And without further ado…..

1) You guessed it: Mario
It was the game that came with the console that helped save the video game world from the biggest draught it ever experienced. Super Mario Brothers. And I’d say that not only is it popular among the populace, but I’d say that since this is Nintendo’s very own mascot that they definitely go out of their way to insure that this funny little Italian plumber gets front row on every platform they work on.


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Well, that’s that, let me know if you have any differences. And if you can make a top 10 (from Nintendo created characters) without it being a list of Super Mario friends, then lets have it.

Until next time
Les

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