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[–]gwern 13 points14 points  (3 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises#At_least_100_million_copies lists Mario games at >100m copies, with a citation for >240m. This is a lower bound, but we have to assume a lot of them were for games in which Mario cannot die. So 240m games are floating around.

A video game console has a life of about 5-10 years (much less, lately, as the console generations slowed down massively in the 2000s), so let's say each game is played over no more than 10 years.

Games tend to be played until they are beaten, if at all, and total game time tends to be no less than 5 hours to dozens of hours; for example, I see message board estimates for New Super Mario Bros. Wii at 4-6 hours for a 'good' player. I couldn't defeat the SNES or NES games in 6 hours, but I wasn't very good at them anyway.

Let's assume 6 hours to beat each game, and so we get a lower bound of 6 * 240m hours; how many people actually beat the game? Dunno, but I can't imagine buying a game and sinking in less than 6 hours over my lifetime. So that's a total of >1440m hours or >1.4b hours.

Now, how many times does Mario die in >1.4b hours? This is the toughy, how many times in playing do you lose a life? (My mother told me once that I would spend hours playing the NES and jumping Mario into the very first pit just to laugh at the funny sound effect, so that's like... 1 death every 10 seconds or 360 deaths an hour.)

I'd say once every 10 minutes is a very generous estimate, so that's 6 deaths an hour. 6 * >1.4b = >8.4b. Sanity check: that's 6 deaths per hour per 6 hours per game or 36 deaths per game; intuitively, this feels low, so it looks like a lower bound as we thought. Second sanity check: the Mario franchise started in 1985 or 27 years ago, which gives an average of 311m Mario deaths per year.

So my best guesstimate is that Mario has died somewhere upwards of 10b times, or at least once for every person on the planet.

Mario died for your sins.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

6 hours per game? 1 death /10 minutes? Thats VERY generous :P

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Well, it's not as funny if I finish estimating 20b+; I never said the lower bound was tight!

[–]Rob_CResident Excel Expert 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mine came out to 150+ billion, and I stand behind it (until people fix the flaws that are certain to be there).

Just because something seems too high isn't a good reason to use un-realistic numbers. If I someone was able to go 10 minutes between deaths, they'd beat the game in record time.

[–][deleted]  (4 children)

[deleted]

    [–]ShakenAstir[S] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

    Yeah, it made me curious. And billions may not be an overstatement.

    [–]cake-please 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I've probably killed him 100-1000 times. The games I played most heavily were Super Mario World for SNES, and then Super Mario Bros. for NES, but that was like 4 years ago when I had a hipster resurgence.

    There are so many Mario games, where to begin . . .

    edit: 100 is a vast underestimate. Maybe more like 1000-10K.

    [–]iammolotov 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Though I think billions is definitely accurate, the actual quote in the comic was millions. For as much effort as he put into that comic (there's some people who said they walked 2 miles, and if you measure the average height of the people in pixels and use that as a scale to the average height of a person in feet, then measure the distance they traveled in pixels and use the same scale to convert to feet, it comes out quite close to 2 actual miles), it seems like a bit of an egregious oversight.

    [–]ShakenAstir[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    The quote in the comic was definitely billions. He's too good to mess that up.

    [–]Rob_CResident Excel Expert 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    Ok, I'm not wasting my time on Donkey Kong, or any of the less popular names. When people say Mario, I think of the NES games, Mario 64, and maybe Mario Galaxy on Wii.

    I found a good source of the sales on the more popular versions, so let's go with that. Here it is in my spreadsheet.

    A little over 188 million units sold. Let's assume they were all opened and played at least once.

    So how many times do people play before they quit? We have to assume on the low end, people play once, hate it and never play again. At the other extreme, we have the people who obsess over every level, play with their friends every time they come over, look for every invisible box, then do it all again in a few years for nostalgia.

    Here's my spreadsheet version of this.

    For these hardcores I decided they would spend 1.5 months time in-game. I've certainly clocked a hell of a lot more in other games, but Mario games typically aren't so deep.

    1.5 months = 45 days = 1080 hours = 64,800 minutes = 3,888,000 seconds = 43,200 deaths @ 90 seconds per death.
    

    Next let's apply a standard deviation to these extremes. I'm no math-guy, so I may not have done it right, but I applied percentages to these numbers as best I could to determine how many people fall in each range.

    Based on the number of units sold (188M) I determined the number of people who quit after a certain number of deaths. On the low end, 188,240 people quit after one death and never played again. Around the middle, there were about 65 million who quit after 213 deaths, or approximately 5 hours in game. Then we have the hardcore players, who pumped in 45 total days in the game, and stopped playing after 43,000 times.

    I added it all together, for a total of 151,536,154,326 deaths. That's 151.5 billion, for people who don't like counting commas.

    The biggest problem I had was the more points of data I included in my standard deviation, the higher the total went. Any math-smart people able to clean this up?

    [–]orionshmorion 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    If your asking for a net amount, you must also consider how many lives he's gained.

    [–]gwern 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    But sooner or later, the game console is turned off... Mario lives only to suffer!

    [–]arodynamicfalcn 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    12 billion is my estimate. it's not quite double the population of the world and i think that the majority of people have probably played long enough to die at least one, but the amount of people that haven't is enough for that gap to be filled with the remainder of those deaths caused by people who have killed him more than once. some people have probably contributed close to 1mil themselves. this is probably one of the hardest ones ever posted on this sub and i never get involved in the ones that involve math.

    [–]Rob_CResident Excel Expert 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    The math is the easy, concrete part. The hard questions are the ones that involve guesswork, especially really broad ones like "How many people have played each game involving mario" and "what is dropoff between people who play for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 hours".