Among the many new Mario games just announced by Nintendo is a particularly big surprise: Super Mario Bros. 35. As you might guess from the name, this is a take on the Tetris 99 style, which is to say, it’s essentially a Mario battle royale game.
In Mario 35, you’ll play a standard game of the original Super Mario Bros. at the same time as 34 other players (which you can see around the border of the screen). You’ll compete to be the last one standing, racing to the finish and sending enemies to other players’ screens as you defeat those enemies within your own game.
That means you’ll also need to contend with enemies suddenly popping up on your screen, but you’ll have some new tools (such as the “item roulette”) to deal with them. As in Tetris 99, you can also use the right stick to select who you’re sending enemies to–random players, attackers, those with the most coins, or those with the lowest time.
Super Mario Bros. 35 is coming to Nintendo Switch and will only be available for Nintendo Switch Online members. It releases on October 1, but it will only be playable for a limited time–it goes away after March 31, 2021.
The “35” in the title is not a random number. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Mario franchise, and Nintendo is celebrating with the announcement of a ton of Mario content. That includes a number of beloved games in the series being ported to Switch, including Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy.
