It was followed in 1993 by a sequel, Mario's Time Machine. This time, players had to travel throughout world history, and instead of answering basic trivia about cities, had to answer basic trivia about the people and places of the past instead.

They were, of course, awful. The games weren't very fun and weren't very educational, a problem most games of this ilk then (and even now) suffer from. But if you ever wanted to see Luigi teach you about Sydney, or listen to Mario bang on about the 17th century (he probably talks more in Mario's Time Machine than in any other game), these were your games.

They weren't the only Mario titles to appear on a PC; those two were just the ones handled by Radical. There were a few others, like a Mario Touch Typing title for Windows and some pre-school games that are so absurdly wonderful they'll star in their own Total Recall one day soon.

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Most interesting, though, is 1995's Mario's Game Gallery, a collection of standard board and card games skinned to feature Nintendo characters. Despite being a weird little PC game, it's actually the first time Charles Martinet - who voices Mario to this day - sat down and recorded lines for the role.

It'd be fascinating to see the line at Nintendo HQ where it was OK to release a certain title on PC and where it wasn't. Famously, Doom creators id software got their start by perfectly porting Super Mario Bros. to the PC, an effort which Nintendo summarily declined to publish. Yet when it came to these, some of which had side-scrolling elements (and which were fit enough to be appear on the SNES) and others which were straight-up games, it was fine.

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The lord may work in mysterious ways, but in the 1990s, so too did Nintendo.