Mario Is Missing: Learning about the World with a Weirdly Long Yoshi

By Marc Normandin | August 27, 2025 | 2:16pm

Video Games Features mario is missing

Mario Is Missing: Learning about the World with a Weirdly Long Yoshi

There was a time where Nintendo played it much looser with how their characters were used and portrayed, when their games were not exclusively on their own platforms. They had mostly, but not fully, settled into a world where their characters appeared in Super Nintendo and Game Boy titles, but there were exceptions. Mostly for educational titles.

The long and short of this exception was that Nintendo was dominating the market, and, per Jeff Ryan’s Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America, they didn’t expect that a few educational games would damage that, even if they didn’t have Mario’s creator and steward, Shigeru Miyamoto, anywhere near them. So this is how Interplay’s Brian Fargo could go to Nintendo and pitch the idea of Mario Teaches Typing for MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh, and be met with an enthusiastic response, or how The Software Toolworks, after acquiring Mindscape, ended up making five educational games starring Mario between 1993 and 1996, for multiple platforms.

Well, four. In one of those games, Mario was missing, after all. Luigi—in his first or second starring role depending on how much credit you want to give 1990’s Game & Watch title Luigi’s Hammer Toss, which was a McDonald’s giveaway with heavy emphasis on the “watch” portion of the name—is determined to find him. Naturally, that game is Mario is Missing! Segue complete.

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Here is the basic premise: Mario, Luigi, and Bowser are all in the real world, as it were, as Bowser has decided to stop torturing the Mushroom Kingdom for a bit and instead do what villains of so much late-’80s and early-’90s media aimed at kids did: attempt to destroy the planet through climate disaster. Bowser’s plan is as follows:

1. Steal important historical artifacts from around the world

2. Sell the important historical artifacts from around the world

3. Melt Antarctica’s ice using hair dryers purchased with the money from the sold important historical artifacts, flooding the Earth.

He has the Koopalings build and guard his castle in Antarctica, and sends his Koopa Troopas out to swipe the artifacts. Mario and Luigi are tasked with finding out what Bowser is up to in Antarctica by some people who remember that these are just a couple of plumbers from Brooklyn, hey, they’re walking here, and Mario ends up imprisoned… somewhere. Luigi sets out to find out where he’s been sent to or locked up or become lost, and is occasionally aided by Yoshi in his travels.

Mario Is Missing

To find Mario, Luigi travels through doors in Bowser’s castle that serve as portals to real-world cities, whose artifacts are in the process of being pilfered. Luigi recovers the artifacts, returns them, and eventually finds Mario while also keeping Bowser from raising the capital needed to slowly melt the planet.

Critics did not like Mario is Missing overly much, for a few reasons. The most common complaints were that it was a terrible Mario game, and that, while aimed at children, it was too difficult for them. There are ways to address both of those issues. For one, Mario is Missing isn’t really a Mario game, and that’s not meant in the pedantic “actually it’s a Luigi game” way. It’s more that it’s an educational game that just happens to star Mario. It’s Carmen Sandiego by way of the Mario bros., in the same way that Mario Teaches Typing is Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, only with a popular made-up mascot instead of one created specifically for the purposes of the educational game. You can’t compare that to Super Mario Bros. 3, because it’s not even remotely trying to be the same thing.

As for being too difficult for children, I have one important question to ask: were children writing those reviews? Or was it all by adults who made that decision for them? I ask this because I was a young child playing Mario is Missing back in the day, as I rented the SNES edition from Blockbuster on multiple occasions before eventually convincing my parents to get it for me. Normally, games were just for special occasions like a birthday or Christmas or if I happened to have the money saved up for one, but since this was an educational game and my parents did not want to stifle my burgeoning nerd, they made an exception. It was not too difficult for me, who was a mere seven or eight years old at the time, because I was by any means special or anything. I just wanted to absorb what it was teaching me.

And absorbing what the game was teaching you was how you gained the knowledge to complete its levels: Luigi would jump on the heads of various red-shelled Koopas, and some of them would have an artifact on them. You would take the artifact and show it to people walking around the city you were in, and they would teach you about what you had in your hand and tell you where it belonged. You would then bring it back, and answer a few (or a couple, if you were playing a computer edition) questions about it using what you had learned from asking around, and then return it, receive a reward, and then get to see a photo of Luigi standing next to the Colosseum in Rome or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or a cable car from Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio De Janeiro.

As someone who did not have consistent—or, at that point, any—access to the internet, who grew up in a very generic New England town with little going on in it even as far as little New England towns go, who did not have a computer at that point and basically had books and video games and whatever on TV could grow the size and concept of the world for me, Mario is Missing was a blessing. Here was a game that wasn’t like other Mario titles, sure, but it also introduced me to cities all over the world, and some of the things that were important to them, and their histories. I didn’t know what a gaucho was before Mario is Missing. It’s been over three decades and I still remember that’s where that word and concept entered my brain, where it remains to this day. Cowboys, from a place that wasn’t America? What else does the world have to offer?

That might seem silly, but let the reader who has never gone down a Wikipedia rabbit hole after discovering some new concept or person cast the first stone here. You’ve all had your gaucho moments, too. Mario is Missing was full of them for a grade schooler.

Mario is Missing wasn’t terribly difficult to navigate, so long as you bothered to pay attention to its design. You had a map of each city plainly marked with everything you could interact with on it, and you crossed the street at crosswalks to change which street you were on. The people could be spoken to multiple times, with you figuring out based on their clues where in the world you were at that moment—which was necessary for bringing Yoshi along to you, allowing you to exit the world when you were finished with it since the exit pipe was guarded by a Pokey—as well as what the artifact you were holding was. You had a computer that could be used to reference any information you had learned to that point, and every info desk you went to had newspapers explaining what was stolen and its historical significance to you, giving you both more info to work with and more to learn about where you were and why. If you could read, then you could play Mario is Missing. And if you weren’t a proficient reader, then that was even more reason to play.

It’s not Super Mario World, no, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Why was the feeling that it was too difficult for the young kids it was geared toward even a consideration? Kids are smarter and more resourceful than people often give them credit for, and they often have a thirst for knowledge. They want to know how things work, what things are—they want to know about the world, and fill their heads with its secrets. Mario is Missing wasn’t a replacement for a detailed history tome focused on Rome or Moscow or Mexico City, no, but it was as great of a starting point as any of the books kids of Mario is Missing-playing age would be able to pick up on the subject. You can’t fool me, I know a bunch of you owned Great Illustrated Classics that in turn made you interested in the original version of Moby Dick or Little Women or The Call of the Wild or The War of the Worlds as you got older. How is Mario is Missing any different than that sort of made-for-kids adaptation of a greater knowledge?

This is all a long way of saying that going back in time to show these critics the kind of tablet timewasters designed for kids that we have access to now would probably get them to change their opinion on Mario is Missing. That game is Metal Gear Solid 2 compared to the things I see my own kids playing on the iPads they have at their grandparents’ house. This not-a-joke would probably fit better in a Mario’s Time Machine feature, but hey. You rent the games you rent, and then you become a person writing an Endless Mode column about them, and the game I rented was Mario is Missing.

A fascinating thing about Mario is Missing is that the game is different depending on which platform you play it on. The NES edition is scaled back in some obvious ways compared to its SNES cousin, but the most significant difference is between the console and computer variants. The original MS-DOS version, which was later released for Macintosh and Windows in a CD-ROM format, was a point-and-click adventure. It’s much slower and more methodical, with a number of limited-use items scattered around to help you navigate what is admittedly a large map given the speed that Luigi casually walks around at. He also didn’t jump on Koopas here, but instead you just had to click on them before they escaped, and then you got to see a comical attempt at running away from Luigi without the stolen artifact in tow. There were more artifacts to return per world, far more conversation—the mayor of a given city would reach out to beg for your help, there were more and differing receptionists at the various famous locales—and for the CD-ROM version there was voice acting and even videos showing off the location the artifact had been stolen from, once you recovered it. Luigi could sit in a theater and see the Trevi Fountain in Rome in action, for instance, which of course is an in for you to let your children know about the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. “It starred Audrey Hepburn in her breakout role, you know,” you could say. “She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for that picture.” See? Educational.

Not only do you get to see Mario and Luigi basically have voices invented for them in the computer editions of Mario is Missing—and I do not just mean the sound of their voices, but also the kinds of things that they would say—but they are also drawn much differently than you’re used to. While the SNES version of the game uses assets from Super Mario World, the MS-DOS et al edition has a taller, elongated Luigi, with some embellished animations to his movement. Yoshi is a walking nightmare. The characters in the cities have more personality in them thanks to their voices, and it in some ways feels more alive and vibrant by not utilizing repurposed sprites and assets, even if again, Yoshi is terrifying to behold. Why is he so long? Why does he sound like that?!

The computer edition also looks less thrown together: the SNES edition of Mario is Missing is a combination of scaled-down or refit PC assets combined with those from Super Mario World, so yeah, it looks a little funky at times. You weren’t playing for visual fidelity, though. You were here to make unexpected discoveries about the world! And as an adult find out that for some reason Lenin’s Tomb isn’t included in the SNES Mario is Missing. Yeah, well, I found out about Lenin, anyway, despite your precautions, so take that.

If you’re reading this, you’re too old for Mario is Missing, but maybe you know a kid who is just the right age. Get it in their hands somehow, and let them decide whether or not it’s no good for a child. It was designed for them, and in at least one case, the game did what it was meant to do, and fed me the kind of information I was ready to absorb, and plenty more that I didn’t know I was prepared for.

Listen, it’s either that or you download one more kids’ tablet game where you throw random foods onto a table and a meal is cooked that seems to have been created independently of your selections. What is going on with that genre of game, anyway? At least they’ve retroactively made Mario is Missing easier to appreciate.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin