Nintendo once asked Sega to move Sonic’s foot behind Mario’s in Olympic Games artwork. That tiny tweak says a lot about how the Mario & Sonic series balanced old rivalries, meticulous branding, and surprisingly clever sports-game design.
Nintendo did not want Sonic’s foot in front.
According to former Sega producer Ryoichi Hasegawa, early Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games artwork showed Sonic’s leading sneaker edging ahead of Mario’s. Nintendo reportedly flagged it, hard, and insisted that Mario’s foot be in front for the cover, cartridge label and other materials. Sega changed it, or there would be no deal.
It is a tiny, petty detail that perfectly captures what made the Mario & Sonic Olympic crossover so weird and so charming. These games were marketed as friendly sports festivals, but the ghost of the console war was still squatting right on the starting line.
From console war to curling partner
When Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games hit Wii in 2007, it did something fans had argued about on playgrounds for more than a decade. It put the mascots in the same game, in an officially licensed setting no less.
The Olympics were a clever compromise. Rather than settle their rivalry in a straight platformer or racer, Sega and Nintendo parked them in a neutral arena where “winning” was sliced into dozens of small events. One character might beat the other in the 100m dash, then lose embarrassingly in trampoline.
Mechanically, the first game leaned hard into the Wii’s new toy-box of motion. Running meant waggling both hands like you were actually sprinting in place. Fencing had you flicking the remote to parry and strike. Table tennis demanded more precision and punished wild swings. It was clearly built as a family party package, but within that, Sega’s sports lineage peeked through. Events like javelin and hammer throw felt closer to classic Track & Field timing challenges than random minigame noise.
The DS version, freed from motion, went in another direction. Stylus flicks and rhythm taps stood in for arm flails, turning races into a kind of short-form WarioWare athletic drill. Right from the start, the series showed an interest in remixing its own design to match each platform instead of just porting a template.
The rivalry, managed with a ruler
Behind the scenes, though, Mario and Sonic were not equals. The foot anecdote is one of several stories that underline how carefully Nintendo guarded Mario’s status.
Hasegawa recalls that artwork with Sonic’s foot in front was not treated as a tossaway fix. It was a priority correction for the box, manual and label. Other reports from marketing partners mentioned rules like “Mario cannot lose,” which is why so many CGI spots end with both mascots hitting the tape at the same time, or Mario winning by the tiniest fraction.
This was branding calculus distilled. Sonic is canonically faster, built on attitude and speed. Mario is the immovable center of Nintendo’s universe. The compromise was that Sonic could look fast, but Mario had to look definitive. So you get countless images where Sonic is mid-stride, leaning forward, but Mario’s shoe is the one that technically leads the frame.
Fans laughed at the pettiness because it felt like an extension of the old schoolyard argument. If the first thing you ever shouted into an internet forum was “Sonic would totally beat Mario in a race,” seeing Nintendo order Sega to move a foot backward lands like a perfect punchline.
Minigames with a stopwatch
Under all that branding fuss, the Olympic games themselves quietly tried to evolve across each entry.
The original Beijing 2008 game is almost pure minigame compilation, thirty-odd events with basic motion or button inputs and a lot of shared systems under the hood. It is rough at the edges, prone to controller flail fatigue, but it nails the fantasy of mashing through a decathlon with friends on the couch.
Vancouver 2010 is where things really click. Sega doubles down on winter sports nuance, leaning into ski and snowboard control schemes that feel closer to full games in their own right. Alpine Skiing and Snowboard Cross have a surprising sense of weight and momentum, especially with balance board support. Bobsleigh and luge rely less on chaos and more on subtle steering where shaving off milliseconds matters.
London 2012 takes a different tack, almost like a single player experiment lurking inside a party game. Festival Mode strings events into a light campaign that walks through the Olympic schedule, giving structure to what had previously been a menu buffet. Some events are reworked with more timing nuance, and there is a heavier focus on difficulty curves and unlocks. It is the closest the series gets to saying, “What if this were your summer sports RPG?”
Sochi 2014 scales back in some places and refines in others, and Rio 2016 splits its identity between Wii U and 3DS. The console version puts more emphasis on slightly more technical control in events like rugby sevens and football. The handheld version experiments again with bite-size stylus and button challenges.
By Tokyo 2020, the series has looped back around into pure celebration. The headline gimmick becomes the 2D “Tokyo 1964” events, a retro filter that turns Mario and Sonic into NES and Mega Drive era throwbacks. Mechanically these are simple, but conceptually they are perfect. The series finally embraces what it always was: a playable museum piece for the rivalry itself.
Mascots as game pieces
One subtle trick the series pulls is using the roster to telegraph stats and play styles without explicit numbers everywhere.
Mario is the balanced all rounder who can comfortably enter almost any event. Sonic and characters like Shadow or Yoshi skew toward speed focused sports such as sprints and long jump. Bowser, Knuckles and Donkey Kong naturally drift into power disciplines like hammer throw or shot put. Characters like Peach, Daisy and Tails embody technical or agility based events such as gymnastics or table tennis.
Each entry fiddles with these categories, but the general mapping holds. When you pick Wario for weightlifting, you are not just choosing a face you like. You are choosing a particular statistical profile the series teaches you to expect.
This is clever brand work. Every character gets to “act” like themselves through mechanics. Waluigi’s lankiness makes him comically effective in events that reward reach. Vector the Crocodile, one of Sega’s odder picks, finds a niche in power or swimming events, reinforcing his bulk and energy.
The result is that even players who never touch a mainline Sonic or Mario platformer come away with a rough mental model of who is fast, who is strong and who is tricky, entirely through repeated Olympic selections.
A surprisingly modern friendship
The Olympic series also broadcast something important about the post hardware war relationship between Nintendo and Sega.
In the 90s, their mascots were framed as cultural opposites. Nintendo was wholesome and family friendly. Sega was cool and edgy, sold on speed and sarcasm. By the late 2000s, Sega was a third party publisher living on Nintendo hardware, and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games became the most visible symbol of that shift.
For Sega, the games were a way to keep Sonic in the mainstream, particularly with younger players who might meet him at the same time as Mario. For Nintendo, they were a way to reinforce Mario’s centrality while presenting him as gracious enough to share the stage with an old rival.
The meticulous control over artwork and results shows that the rivalry had become ritualized. It was no longer a real commercial knife fight. It was a pantomime both companies could cash in on. The GamesRadar launch interviews of the time are filled with carefully worded nostalgia, constantly reminding you that yes, they used to be enemies, but now they are cheering together on a track.
That makes the foot story funnier, not darker. It is a tiny reminder that even a playful rivalry needs a referee when two decades of brand equity are involved.
Why the rivalry still sticks
The series has been quiet around Paris 2024, and there is no sign yet of a new entry for future Olympics. Yet the images persist. Mario and Sonic in matching national track kits. Eggman and Bowser sharing a podium. Peach and Blaze synchronizing their gymnastics.
Part of why the rivalry still resonates is that it aged into myth right as a generation of players grew up. The kids who once argued Sega vs Nintendo are now old enough to read about marketing foot placement and laugh. The sports compilation that originally felt like a strange one off cash grab has turned into a kind of comfort food. Any time the Olympics roll around, people still ask when Mario and Sonic are getting their tickets.
Mechanically, the games were never flawless, but they were rarely lazy. Across a decade, they kept trying new input ideas, new event structures and new ways of letting these mascots perform themselves. Even the worst entries are more interesting than their reputation suggests once you look past the waggle.
And at the heart of it all is that starting line, Mario on the left, Sonic on the right, Nintendo’s notes making sure one red shoe is framed a few pixels ahead. The plumbing and the hedgehog finally met in the middle, and Mario still got to be one step ahead.