What is The Next Mario Game?

With all of the recent talk surrounding the Breath of the wild sequel delay, it leaves a hug gap for premier  Nintendo titles in the second half of 2022. And it got me thinking about the possibility of a new Super Mario game, which would be amazing and sell more consoles but how realistic is it ?

There are two ways that we can try to theorize how much of a possibility a new Mario game is with the first being the typical reveal to release timeframe.  Obviously to make the most sense, we will look at Odyssey since it the most recent and relevant. Super Mario Odyssey was revealed on January 13, 2017 and a little over 9 months later on October 27, 2017 it was released. This means that if a new Mario title is coming this fall we should be hearing about it sometime soon. 

The second is to see what the average time between Mario games is. If we look at the longest gaps between titles we can see 6 years between Super Mario world and Mario 64 and another six years between 64 and sunshine.  5 from sunshine to galaxy.  Finally there were 4 between 3D world on the Wii U and Odyssey on switch. 

Even at the longest we are looking at 6 years for the time between development, we were only considering console releases.  If you add in handheld games that graced  the Game Boy, GBA, DS and 3DS then many of those gaps are drastically less. You also have to account for the consolidation of their handheld and home console market with the 3DS being discontinued.  Six years from 2017 is 2023 but without Zelda landing this year does Nintendo try to make it 5 and launch a new Mario title this fall ?