Super Mario World

Super Mario World is a side-scrolling 2D platform game in which the player controls Mario or Luigi. The gameplay is similar to earlier games in the Super Mario series but introduces new elements. As well as dashing and jumping, the player can also fly or float with the aid of the Cape Feather and P-Balloon and can execute the new Spin Jump move, which allows the player to crush enemies, jump off Yoshi, and bounce off normally-invulnerable ones safely or break certain blocks, if and only if the player has a power-up active. There are 96 level exits in total.

The player navigates via two screens: an overworld map and a side-scrolling course (some of which scroll automatically). The overworld map displays an overhead representation of the current world and has several paths leading from the world's entrance to a castle. Paths connect to action panels, fortresses, ghost houses, castles, and other map icons, allowing players to take different routes to reach the world's goal. Moving the on-screen character to an action panel or castle grants access to that course.

The plot of Super Mario World is detailed in the instruction booklet. After bringing peace to the Mushroom World in Super Mario Bros. 3, the brothers Mario and Luigi decide to go on vacation with Princess Toadstool to a place called Dinosaur Land, a prehistoric-themed world swarming with dinosaurs and other enemies. While resting on the beach, the princess is captured by Bowser.

When Mario and Luigi wake up, they try to find her and, after hours of searching, come across a giant white egg with green spots in the forest. It suddenly hatches and out of it comes a young dinosaur named Yoshi, who tells them his dinosaur friends have also been imprisoned in eggs by Bowser's kids, the evil Koopalings. Mario and Luigi soon realise that Bowser's forces must have captured Toadstool as well. Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi set out to rescue the princess and Yoshi's dinosaur friends, traversing through Dinosaur Land for Bowser and his Koopalings.

Super Mario World was directed by Takashi Tezuka, while Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of both Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, served as producer. Shigefumi Hino took the role of graphics designer. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development handled development with a team of fifteen people, including three main programmers and a character designer, most of whom had worked on past Super Mario games. In a retrospective interview, the core team said Miyamoto wielded the most authority during development.

In an interview with TOUCH Magazine, then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi pointed out that sales of the Famicom were slowly dropping ever since its peak about two years earlier, and that if they continued supporting it, players would eventually "get bored" and move on in favor of better-quality games, which would be "a dangerous situation" for them. Super Mario World was the first Mario series game developed for the then-upcoming Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). As such, the team anticipated some difficulty in working with new and more advanced hardware. According to Tezuka, the software tools were not yet fully developed, and the team had to "go along with starting something new".

Super Mario World has sold 20.61 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling SNES game. In the United States, Super Mario Advance 2 for the Game Boy Advance sold 2.5 million copies and earned $74 million in revenue by August 2006. During the period between January 2000 and August 2006, it became the second highest-selling portable game in the United States.

Super Mario World received critical acclaim. In December 2019, review aggregator website GameRankings ranked Super Mario World as the 78th highest-rated game of all time, with an aggregate score of 94% based on nine reviews.

As a pack-in game for the SNES, Super Mario World helped popularise the console, and became the best-selling game of its generation. Shigeru Miyamoto has said that Super Mario World is his favourite Mario game. In December 2025, IGN named Super Mario World the best Mario game.

Yoshi became one of the most important characters in the Mario franchise, appearing in later Super Mario games and in nearly all Mario sports and spin-off games. Yoshi appears as the main playable character in Super Mario World's 1995 prequel Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, which helped lead to multiple video games focused on the character. A Super Mario World clone, Super Mario's Wacky Worlds, was in development for the Philips CD-i device by NovaLogic from 1992 to 1993, but was cancelled because of the console's commercial failure. In a poll conducted in 2008, Yoshi was voted as the third-favourite video game character in Japan, with Cloud Strife and Mario placing second and first.