The Mario Forum

The Mario Forum was created in September 2002, along with the Grand Theft Auto Forum, as part of OtakuBoards’ Version 6 upgrade. A dedicated home for Super Mario Brothers discussion seemed like a natural addition to the then-popular Zelda and Pokemon forums, but sadly reaction to the new forum was lukewarm at best. Even the forum’s designated moderator, Semjaza Azazel, was largely inactive and indifferent to the place.

One of the largest motivations for creating a Mario Forum was ShineGet.com, a proposed Super Mario Brothers website to be created by James and other prominent OtakuBoards gamers. OB would have served as the site’s official message boards and, hopefully, would have generated interest in the project. Sadly the project fell apart before getting off of the ground, with the Mario Forum itself following suit shortly afterwards.

The few threads that were created for the Mario Forum were extremely generic (Favorite Character, Favorite Game, etc.) and dominated by James and Desbreko. One notable exception was Zero Sama‘s The History of the Great Mario which stood as a testament to the untapped potential that the Mario Forum had.

It was no surprise to anyone that James was given the ‘Mushroom Kingdom Award’ by an overwhelming 12-vote margin in the 2003 Otaku Awards. Ironically, most of the members who had voted to award James this prize never actually posted in the forum itself.

For months the forum sat inactive, and it was ultimately decided that both it and the GTA forum should be put out of their misery. The loss of these two forums was the first of several major reductions to the gaming sections of the boards, ultimately leading to the single gaming forum OB has today.

With barely two dozen threads and a few hundred posts, the Mario Forum proved to be the least active and successful gaming forum in OtakuBoards’ history. It was quietly deleted in February 2003.

Categories: Forums