Wario

Wario first showed up as Mario's opponent in Super Mario Land 2, and Nintendo quickly understood that a greedy antihero with an enormous nose could carry a series of his own. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 from 1994 built its platforming on a different principle than Mario: not the elegance of a jump but brute force, shoulder charges into walls, treasure hunting and the tallest possible pile of coins at the end. Virtual Boy Wario Land then proved that solid work was possible even on Nintendo's least fortunate console.

The real oddity arrived with Wario Land II, where the hero essentially cannot die. Instead of costing lives, hits transform him: he catches fire, balloons up, gets flattened, and the player has to use those states to move forward. Wario Land 3 on Game Boy Color and above all Wario Land 4 on Game Boy Advance pushed the idea to its limit, and the fourth game, with its frantic timed escapes, is often called the peak of the series. Wario World took the character into three dimensions on GameCube, but the biggest impact came from a completely different spin-off. WarioWare, Inc. chopped play into microgames a few seconds long, where you barely have time to read the single word of instruction, and founded a format the industry keeps returning to. Wario grew from a Mario parody into a workshop of ideas with no real equivalent at Nintendo.