The series that was originally thought to be an April Fool’s joke appears to be at an end. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games will not be happening in conjunction with the games currently going on in Paris, and according to Lee Cocker, who worked as a producer on all of the Mario & Sonic games, the series is “finished” with the 2020 Tokyo games.
With the Olympics currently active, it’s not surprising at all that there will be no Mario & Sonic entry this time around. In the past, these games were typically released about six months in advance to garner hype for the real-world event. For the first time since the 2008 games in Beijing, the Summer Olympics do not have the two video game icons competing. The Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 was also skipped.
The Mario & Sonic games have never been a massive must-have experience, but when the first game was announced, it was big news. It had been years since Sega dipped out of the console market and killed their rivalry with Nintendo, but seeing the red plumber and blue hedgehog star in the same game was not expected at all. The April 1, 2007 announcement that the game they were co-starring in was an Olympics-themed mini-game collection made many think it wasn’t real.
In 2019, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 released as a decent send-off for the series. The game celebrates the characters’ 8 and 16-bit origins with 2D mini-games but never did much to necessitate people to come back more than a week after its launch. The 2020 pandemic delaying the real-world games by a year didn’t help anything. If this is the end for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, the series had quite a run for what it was.
