"How many Super Mario games are there?", a deceptively difficult question to answer.

"How many Super Mario games are there?", a deceptively difficult question to answer.

TL;DR Despite (or even perhaps *because of*) the Super Mario mainline series being a major pillar of video game culture, there is no consensus as to which games make up that series. Looking further into this question leads into a linguistics rabbit hole. Heads up: the following is abnormally wordy even by my standards, and I'm the kind of person who regularly runs into the Discord character limit by accident despite the Nitro subscription increa…