Wario

Wario is a recurring character of the Mario series and the protagonist of the Wario series. He is also a playable character in Super Smash Flash 2.

Character description
When Nintendo launched in 1989 the Game Boy handheld system, Gunpei Yokoi's Super Mario Land launched with it. Mario's 8-bit adventure was so successful that three year later, a sequel arrived.  takes place directly after the first game, when Mario comes home after defeating the evil alien Tatanga. When he arrives, he discovers that his castle has been taken over by his antagonistic, greedy counterpart, Wario, and he must retrieve the 6 Golden Coins hidden around the land to get his home back. In the final showdown, Wario was revealed to look very much like Mario himself, except fatter, slightly shorter, and with a big, bulbous nose that had a jagged, pointy mustache jutting out of it. In a three-part battle, Wario uses the same power-ups that Mario had access to throughout the game, and adds his own abilities to the mix. Wario charges at his opponent with his shoulder, and crashes to the floor butt first, which become staple moves for the character in future games. When conquered by Mario, he reverted to a "tiny" form, and escaped out the window to search for better treasures.

And search for them he did, as he landed a starring role in the third game in the series, . It takes place directly after 6 Golden Coins, in which Wario sets out to earn as much gold as humanly possible, so he can buy his own castle and rub it in Mario's goody-goody face. This game played differently than the first two games, because Wario brought his own style with him. Instead of deploying acrobatics like Mario, Wario relied on his brute strength, and the ability to sport various hats that gave him different powers, such as a dragon hat that spewed fire. He also gained his own villain in this adventure, the equally greedy Captain Syrup, who captured a Genie to use for her own selfish purposes. By the end of the quest, Wario gives both Syrup and the Genie a sound thrashing, and pays the Genie to grant him his castle. After antagonizing Mario and his friends yet again in games such as Wario's Woods and Mario and Wario, Wario continued to have three more adventures on various Game Boy platforms. In , Wario experiences a case of bad karma when Captain Syrup kicks him out of his own castle and steals it.  involves Wario doing his first (slightly) unselfish deed, saving the inhabitants of a music box from the devious Rudy the Clown - on the condition that he gets to keep all the treasure that he earned along the way. In , he does what Mario had been doing for the last decade beforehand and rescues a princess. Through these games, Wario eventually evolved from the classification of "villain" and earned the title of "anti-hero".

After all these platforming escapades, Wario, now sporting biker gear as opposed to a yellow and purple version of Mario's duds, notices the boom of the video game industry, and decides to take advantage of this craze by forming his own game company. Due to his short attention span, instead of creating a single game of reasonable length, he opts to make over two hundred games, each of them a mere five seconds long. Too short to even be called "minigames", they were dubbed "microgames". Finally, since he was too lazy to make all these games himself, he hires a handful of his fellow residents of Diamond City to do his dirty work for him, among them the feisty multi-talented Mona, and the Nintendo superfan 9-Volt. Thus, the WarioWare franchise was born.

Wario has also made appearances in a great number of Mario spin-offs, including the Mario Kart and Mario Party games, as well as a large number of Mario sports titles. In these titles, Wario is no longer evil, but more of a bumbling comic relief. His rumored brother bent on bothering Mario's brother, Luigi, is soon revealed, being named Waluigi.

Due to Wario's popularity, he was one of the newcomers in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Instead of being added as yet another Mario character, Wario enters the arena representing his own Wario franchise.

In Super Smash Flash 2
Following his appearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Wario finally made his debut in the Super Smash Flash series in its second game Super Smash Flash 2. His sprites are completely custom made and based on his appearance in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. His previous used sprites were edited from Wario Land 4. He is the only character representative from the Wario universe. Most of his old moveset was similar to his moveset in the Brawl hack Project M, which included new attacks and different properties from his original moveset. However, his new move set is a mix of his 3DS and Wii U and SSF2 moveset.

Trivia

 * Even though Wario does not appear in Super Smash Flash, many elements from the game Wario Land 4 are used, including enemy sprites, the Floating Islands and the All-Star Rest Area.
 * This has led to the rumor that Wario could have been planned to be a playable character, however, Gregory McLeod has never made any statements about the subject.
 * It is a common misconception that Wario's SSF2 moveset is inspired by his moveset in Project M. However, demo v0.7 was released on January 1, 2011, while Wario's inclusion in PM did not happen until April 17, 2012; one year, three months and sixteen days after Wario's inclusion in SSF2.