Mario Party

About Mario Party

Mario Party (1998) is Hudson Soft's Nintendo 64 board game with 50 mini-games, the first in Nintendo's long-running party series and the game whose stick-spinning mini-games led to a glove settlement.

Mario Party in Depth

Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Wario and Donkey Kong compete to be the "Super Star" on boards themed after each of them, with two more unlocked later. Four characters play each game, any not taken by humans run by the computer at three skill levels, over 20, 35 or 50 turns. Players roll a dice block to move one to ten spaces. Blue spaces give three coins and red ones take three, doubling in the last five turns; others trigger single-player mini-games, Chance Time coin and star swaps, board events, Bowser's interference or a mushroom that grants or costs a turn. Stars are bought from Toad with coins. Boo steals coins for free or a star for 50 coins, Koopa Troopa hands out ten coins at the start, and Bowser forces useless items on passers-by.

After each round of moves, one of 50 mini-games starts, chosen by roulette and set as four-player, one-versus-three or two-versus-two by the colour of the spaces players landed on. At the end three bonus stars go to the top mini-game earner, the richest player and whoever landed on the most "?" spaces. Coins saved in the Mushroom Bank buy mini-games for free play and items in the Mushroom Shop, and Mini-Game Island is a single-player run through every mini-game with four lives.

Making Mario Party

Hudson Soft developed the game for a young audience, with Shigeru Miyamoto supervising, and Nintendo released it in Japan on 18 December 1998, North America on 8 February 1999 and Europe on 9 March 1999. Reviews were generally favourable but said its fun depended on playing with friends: GameSpot's Joe Fielder noted that the mini-games were "nowhere near as good in the single player mode", and critics found the computer players' turns painfully slow and the luck excessive. Its music was praised and its graphics drew mixed views. It was among the five most rented games in its first two months in the US and the fourth best-selling Nintendo 64 game there in 1999, and it began a series that continued with Mario Party 2 later that year.