Super Mario Bros. Wonder fastest-selling Mario game ever in Europe

Nintendo has announced that Super Mario Bros. Wonder is Europe's fastest-selling Super Mario game ever.

The company announced the statistic today on social media, though did not provide any concrete sales figures. We'll likely get those as part of a global sales update, or financial statement.

Regardless, it's a positive sign things have gone well for Elephant Mario and his warp pipe-stuffing chums - even if Nintendo's mascot couldn't quite beat Spider-Man 2 in the UK's boxed game chart on Monday.

Here in the UK, Wonder was Mario's third-biggest UK launch, behind a duo of other Switch titles: Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D All-Stars.

Wonder launched on Switch last Friday, 20th October. Eurogamer's Chris Donlan was blown away by the game, calling it an "endless cascade of ideas in a game that takes Mario to some wonderfully strange places" in Eurogamer's Super Mario Bros. Wonder review.

I spoke with Wonder's lead developers back at Gamescom, and discussed the challenges of making a new Super Mario sidescroller that still felt surprising and fresh for players - something Wonder excels at.

"As we were developing more and more side-scrolling Mario games, the challenge became that these kinds of secrets and surprises were more and more normalised to players," Super Mario Bros. Wonder director Shiro Mouri told me. "So I thought it'd be important to create a side-scrolling Mario that really fit the day and age that we live in now.

"You need to try harder to try and surprise these players."