Le Guerre des Mascottes - L'histoire de mario Vol 2 : 1990 - 1995

Sonic, Donkey Kong, Yoshi... But also Mickey, Bugs Bunny, Taz... Not forgetting a gallery of reptiles, a lynx, a bat, several foxes, a horde of squirrels... Between 1990 and 1995, more than 340 different avatars were available to gamers, including industry veterans like Pac-Man, new cartoon stars like the Animaniacs, and celebrities caught up in the video game craze like Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. What do they all have in common? They appear in two-dimensional platform games, the fun, bouncy genre whose codes were defined by Super Mario Bros. in 1985.

So why the craze half a decade later? How did the many players in the sector come to adopt the same genre, the same tone, the same marketing strategy, to the point of giving birth to the famous formula of the "mascot video game", between Mr. Nutz, Bubsy and Aero The Acro-Bat? How does Nintendo, the creative engine of a genre, adapt to the aggressive head-on competition from SEGA's hedgehog and this multitude of new parasites? In the history of Mario, the first decade of the 1990s was one of the most decisive and paradoxical: the decade in which the plumber, Nintendo and Japanese know-how in general were no longer the undisputed No. 1.

The Story of Mario vol.2 - 1990-1995: The Mascot Wars is the sequel to The Story of Mario - 1981-1991: The Rise of an Icon. A sequel that opens with Nintendo's original sin, and concludes with a study of Yoshi's Island, but a sequel that, generally speaking, will be more about Nintendo than anything else. Or why this period, which seemed like a big washing-up, managed to shake up the Japanese manufacturer by causing its flagship character to lose much of its lustre...