Trivia / Mario Party

• Ascended Fanon: Peach's description in Mario Party 4 says she's "surprisingly mischievous", which is probably a nod to her tendency to screw the player over frequently among fans.
• Blooper:
  • In Super Mario Party, a Microsoft Windows mouse cursor can be seen in the corner of Square Off’s page.
  • In The Top 100, the 2 tracks "Going for the Coins" and "Know What I Mean?" return, but are respectively incorrectly referred to by the name of the unrelated 2 track "Take the Coin" and missing the question mark; all of the returning tracks from 3 are referred to by unofficial translations of their Japanese names instead of their actual localised names; both the 6 track "Slow and Steady" and the 7 track of the same name return without any sort of disambiguation^note however, they only have the same name in English; and the name of "Soar to Score"'s theme is the same as its mini-game despite 10 giving it the name "Time It Just Right". Superstars also brought back the aforementioned 2 tracks, still with those errors, and while several more tracks from 3 returned with their correct names, the ones previously in The Top 100 still have their unofficially translated names; however, both "Slow and Steady"s returned and are now disambiguated.
• Creator-Driven Successor: To the Game & Watch Gallery series. The Modern versions of the games feature Mario characters playing minigames, which would become the staple of Mario Party.
• Divorced Installment: Castle Clearout, a minigame from 9, appears in Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics with all ties to the Mario series removed.
• Dummied Out: The N64 trilogy has a particularly odd mechanic revolving around "yellow spaces". Should all players land on a yellow space, no minigame occurs and the next turn begins. But since there’s no way to land on yellow spaces during normal gameplay, the only way to see this unused mechanic is by hacking the game. It is bugged in 2 and 3 where the lack of a minigame at the end of the turn results in the game continuing past the final turn. The idea of a yellow space doing nothing would technically get used later in Advance.
• Exiled from Continuity: Some original characters created for the series haven't appeared in many years for one reason or another:
  • Koopa Kid and his kin disappeared from the series starting with 8, essentially being replaced as Bowser's right-hand man by Bowser Jr. from DS onwards. This is zigzagged in The Top 100 and Superstars, as while Koopa Kid still appears on the boxart scans for past titles (since it was likely too much of a hassle to edit him out without the original masters), he is not in the character archives, and is replaced with Bowser Jr. for the remakes of certain minigames. Koopa Kid's absence in Superstars is noticeable to the point that in the Mario Party 5 section of the credits, he is the only playable newcomer from that game whose promotional artwork isn’t shown alongside the other newcomers (Toad and Boo).
  • Averted for the most part with other Mario Party original characters such as MC Ballyhoo, Tumble, Twila, and Brighton, who explicitly appear in the character archives for The Top 100 and Superstars. In addition, the latter game fully brings back Woody and Evil Woody.
  • None of the residents from Mushroom Village^note renamed Village Square return in Superstars, with their roles being taken over by various mainstays including Kamek, Toadette, and Shy Guy.
  • For a semi-sentient example, Steamer the train was introduced in 2 and made cameos in 3, 4, 5, and DS. Given that Hudson Soft was shut down in 2012 and Steamer was created by them, its chances of ever appearing in the series again are very improbable.
• Follow the Leader: The success of the series led to other video game companies making their own multiplayer party-based games (though very few, if any, were able to capture what made this series work). These include, but are not limited to, Shrek Super Party, Crash Bash, Nickelodeon Party Blast, Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt, SpongeBob SquarePants: Lights, Camera, Pants!, Pac-Man Party, Muppets Party Cruise, Tweety and the Magic Gems, Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure, M&M's Blast, Bomberman Land, Monopoly Party, Party Time With Winnie the Pooh, Garfield Lasagna Party, Disney's Party, and Sonic Shuffle. Amusingly enough, several of these copycats were even developed by Hudson Soft, the same company that developed the first eight Mario Party games, including Sonic Shuffle, Fusion Frenzy 2, and obviously the Bomberman Land series.
• He Also Did: Before devoting itself full-time to Mario Party, the series' codeveloper CAProduction was a reliable producer of cult action games, having created such titles as Gate Of Thunder and Hagane: The Final Conflict.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: None of the the GameCube installments (4, 5, 6, and 7) were ever released outside of their native console (although this is mitigated by the fact that the Wii can play most GameCube games); in the case of the latter two, the microphone functionality could be difficult to replicate on consoles that lack such a function.
• Meme Acknowledgement: Nintendo of Europe posted a clip from The Top 100, featuring Luigi winning in Bumper Balls by doing absolutely nothing. Its caption? "Yes, it still works."
• No Dub for You: Island Tour, 10, and Star Rush were localised into Portuguese and Russian; The Top 100 and (in the former's case) Super were not, nor were any of the pre-Island Tour games, period.
• No Export for You: None of the arcade installments (which were developed by Capcom rather than Hudson Soft or ND Cube) were released outside of Japan.
• The Other Darrin:
  • The first two games have Luigi, Wario, Peach and Toad voiced by their voice actors from the Japanese version of Mario Kart 64 (Julien Bardakoff, Thomas Spindler, Asako Kozuki and Tomoko Maruno respectively) instead of their voice actors from the international version. Starting with the third game, Charles Martinet voices Luigi and Wario and Jen Taylor voices Peach. Toad, on the other hand, wouldn't have his voice actress changed until Mario Party 4.
  • Related to the above, Jen Taylor would voice Peach, Toad and Toadette from Mario Party 3, 4 and 6 onwards respectively, but due to her retiring from her roles in the Mario series, she was replaced with Samantha Kelly as all three starting with Mario Party 8.
  • In the first seven games, Donkey Kong doesn't have a voice actor and instead vocalizes through stock monkey noises. From 8 onwards, he's voiced by Takashi Nagasako.
  • In the first three games, Yoshi vocalizes entirely through his 16-bit sound effects from Super Mario World. Starting with 4, he's given a proper voice provided by Kazumi Totaka.
  • In the first five games, Bowser lacks a voice actor and instead vocalizes through stock monster roars (with the exception of his laugh, which is provided by Charles Martinet). In Mario Party 6, 7, 8 and DS he is voiced by Scott Burns. From 9 onwards, he's voiced by Kenny James.
  • Daisy is voiced by Jen Taylor in Mario Party 3, 4 and 5. Starting with the sixth game, she's voiced by Deanna Mustard.
  • In his first appearance in the series with Mario Party DS, Bowser Jr. is voiced by Dolores Rogers. Following games from 9 onwards have him voiced by Caety Sagoian.
  • In a sense, Boo was voiced by Charles Martinet in the first seven games using stock recordings from Super Mario 64. Starting with 8, he's been voiced by Sanae Suzaki, although Martinet's recordings have occasionally been reused alongside Suzaki's.
• Referenced by...: Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): At the end of Chapter 9, in a flashback to the past, Mario Party is in the known list of games that Death and Dracula own.
• Sequel Gap: After having a new installment nearly every year since the series' inception (with only 2006 skipping a new Mario Party release in North America), the series went on a five year hiatus between DS and 9. Those two games were released in 2007 and 2012 respectively. The series also went on a three year hiatus between Super in 2018 and Superstars in 2021.
• Studio Hop: The first eight games were originally developed by Hudson Soft. Around the same time Konami disintegrated Hudson in March 2012, NDCube took over as the series' primary developer, retaining most of the Production Posse from Hudson.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • Around late 2020, YouTube started inexplicably recommending videos showcasing creepy alleged anti-piracy measures that are supposedly in Mario Party DS, to the point where the top autofill result for searching "Mario Party" was "DS anti-piracy"; these countermeasures ranging from a simple warning screen on boot-up, to the game throwing punishments during gameplay to deter would-be pirates. All of these videos, without exception, are fan-created content — no game in the Mario Party series contains any type of anti-piracy measure, not even a simple crash. The Cutting Room Floor had to outright permalock the page for Mario Party DS as a result of the amount of users trying to add information about the fake anti-piracy screens.
  • No, it is not possible to roll the number you want by skillfully hitting the dice block at the precise time^note unless you use the Sluggish/Slow 'Shroom Orb in 6 and 7 and the Slowgo Candy in 8. How rolls are handled is different throughout the series, but the general consensus is that either the number is rolled after every turn, or each roll is pre-determined from a seed after each non-duel mini-game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first board in DS was originally intended to be run by Petey Piranha as a war zone and the Piranha Plant who served as the area's boss was originally intended to have been a turncoat from his army. It was ultimately decided to make Wiggler the board's host and the setting was changed to a garden accordingly.
  • An early trailer for 9 shows a Bowser Jr. minigame where players chase Bowser Jr. in a 2D platform setup, which is nowhere to be found in the final game.
  • Left in the data of Super Mario Party is a screenshot of a completely unused board called "Sky Building", a metropolitan skyscraper board.

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