Bowser’s Fury is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, February 12, 2025. Below, we look at how the unusual experiment married classic Mario level design with an open world, and what it could mean for the future.
Bowser’s Fury launched as a bonus, bundled alongside a game Nintendo had already finished selling to its audience. Five years later, that framing feels misleading. What looked like an extra now reads as a compressed design thesis, a Mario game caught between the tight structure of its past and the exploratory freedom that could shape its future.
Bowser’s Fury occupies a strange and revealing place in Mario’s long history. Released as a companion to Super Mario 3D World on the Nintendo Switch, it was easy to treat it as a six-hour-long side adventure rather than a statement. Now it reads less like an add-on and more like a snapshot of Mario in transition, capturing a rare middle ground between the tightly structured design of 3D World and the freeform exploration that has defined 3D Mario since Super Mario 64.
