Dr Mario
Dr. Mario is a Nintendo puzzle video game and the alter ego of Mario as a physician who tosses two-toned vitamin capsules at viruses inside a bottle. First released in 1990 for the NES and Game Boy, the title spawned decades of sequels, playable Super Smash Bros. appearances, and running online jokes about why the plumber suddenly holds a medical degree.
Overview
Dr. Mario is both a 1990 Nintendo puzzle game and the persona Mario takes on inside that series, trading his plumbing overalls for a white lab coat, stethoscope, and head mirror1. Play centers on a bottle filled with red, blue, and yellow viruses; the player rotates two-toned capsules as they fall and lines up four matching colors in a row to clear them off the field1.
In the game's fiction, Dr. Mario works at the Mushroom Kingdom Hospital alongside Nurse Peach (localized as Nurse Toadstool in English versions) and deploys vitamin capsules of his own invention to neutralize a tri-color virus outbreak caused by a lab accident1. Nintendo treats Dr. Mario as a distinct character from regular Mario in some spin-off media, most visibly the Super Smash Bros. series, where his moveset closely tracks Mario's but swaps fireballs for medical caplets1.
The gameplay slots Dr. Mario into the tile-matching puzzle genre, an area later dominated by titles like Bejeweled but rooted in the Tetris-era design boom of the late 1980s2.
How It Spread
How to Use This Meme
In gameplay, players rotate falling two-colored capsules and stack them so that four or more same-colored halves line up vertically or horizontally next to a virus of that color, which then vanishes1. Levels typically end when every virus in the bottle is cleared, and losing means letting the stack overflow the top of the bottle4.