Super Mario Bros is now a battle royale

Move over Fortnite, PUBG and Apex Legends—there's a new battle royale king, and he's a plumber in a red hat.

Mario Royale is a browser-based battle royale version of the original Super Mario Bros that dumps 100 players into a world and asks them to race to the end. You can't directly interact with players, but you can damage them with koopa shells, or break the block they're standing on to send them tumbling down. Power-ups are shared, so only one player can grab that crucial mushroom.

The game randomly selects either world 1, 2, or 3 at the start of a round, and to win you have to be one of the first three players to reach Bowser's castle at the end of the world. You need to go fast, but you also need to make sure you survive, so it might be worth going out of your way for power-ups, even if it means having to catch up to the leaders later on.

"What I've done here is a true sin," says creator InfernoPlus, but players don't seem to mind. As I write this, more than 400 players are online, and it took me all of 10 seconds to find a game. Each round is quick, and most people die within a minute, which makes it easy to jump into another round. You can control Mario with either your keyboard or a controller.

It's fun, chaotic, and well worth a quick go: you can try it here. Remember, it might not be around for long. "Please don't sue me. Please," says InfernoPlus on the game's loading screen.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.