Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 GAMEBOY

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, released in 1994, closes out the Super Mario Land trilogy by handing the spotlight to Mario’s rival Wario for the first time — a role he’d keep in every subsequent Wario Land game rather than returning to Mario. The setup: Wario, having lost his own castle to Mario in Super Mario Land 2, sets off to find treasure and build a new one, chasing a genie’s magic lamp across a series of pirate-themed islands.

The bigger shift is mechanical. Wario can’t die from most hazards the way Mario could — instead of a game over, getting hit by fire turns him into “Flaming Wario,” electricity turns him into “Bubble Wario,” and other transformations grant new temporary abilities like float or magnetism, turning damage into a puzzle-solving tool rather than a pure fail state. He’s also just physically tougher: shoulder-tackling enemies and blocks that would otherwise stop Mario cold.

Four different endings are tied to how much treasure the player collects, an unusually replay-driven structure for a Game Boy platformer of this era, and it set the template — persistent unusual-hazard transformations, a greedier and tougher protagonist — for the entire Wario Land series that followed.