23 Years Ago, Nintendo Launched the WarioWare Franchise

On May 26, 2003, Nintendo released one of the company's most important games in a long time: WarioWare, Inc.

While WarioWare is rarely mentioned among Nintendo's best-ever titles, it's a game whose legacy and impact have long outshone the game itself. Originally released on the Game Boy Advance, WarioWare is an endurance test of minigames that are presented to the player at increasing speeds until they run out of lives.

It's a very different game from anything Nintendo had tried before. The publisher was typically known for their great narrative games, like Super Mario Sunshine or the Legend of Zelda franchise. But WarioWare doesn't have much of a story-it brought the company back to its roots with pure, challenging gameplay mechanics.

WarioWare was a massive hit with critics and general audiences alike, who praised the game for its endearing simplicity and fun minigames. It would go on to win GameSpot's Editor's Choice Award, and has since been named in plenty of rankings of the greatest games ever released.

While WarioWare was originally envisioned as a standalone game that was essentially just a way of feeding these fun minigames to players, it became one of Nintendo's longest-running franchises.

Not long after its release, Nintendo announced WarioWare, Inc: Mega Party Games, a version of the game with multiplayer mechanics so players could bring their friends into the fun. Countless sequels followed in the years afterward, including WarioWare: Twisted!, WarioWare: Snapped!, and WarioWare Gold.

There are currently twelve main games in the WarioWare franchise, with the most recent installment being WarioWare: Get It Together for the Nintendo Switch. The franchise has primarily maintained the same structure for the past 20 years, simply presenting audiences with new minigames and seeing how fast they can complete them all.

It's a perfect display that sometimes, less is more when it comes to video games. While franchises like Super Mario continue to get more complex with new gameplay mechanics and a much larger scope, WarioWare proved that you don't always need innovation to keep a franchise alive.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on May 26, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 9:37 AM.