The Mario Porno Nintendo Supposedly Buried
There's a piece of gaming trivia that practically everyone who's been online long enough has absorbed: Nintendo secretly owns two Mario-themed porn parodies starring Ron Jeremy, which it bought specifically to bury them forever. It shows up in every "mind-blowing gaming facts" listicle. It gets stated with total confidence. And the funny thing is, the part everyone repeats as gospel is the one part nobody has ever actually proven. The real story is more interesting than the legend — partly because of that.
1993: a very bad year to be Mario
To understand how this happened, you have to remember what 1993 looked like for the franchise. Nintendo greenlit a big live-action Super Mario Bros. movie with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. It was a disaster — a notorious commercial and critical bomb that made back roughly half its budget and is still cited as one of the worst video game adaptations ever made.
While that was happening, the adult industry did what the adult industry does with any piece of pop culture big enough to parody. Two films got produced, timed to ride the wave of the Mario movie's release: Super Hornio Brothers and Super Hornio Brothers II.
What the films actually were
This is the part that's solidly documented. The two films were directed by Buck Adams and starred Ron Jeremy as "Squeegie Hornio" — the Mario analog — alongside T.T. Boy as his brother "Ornio." The plot, such as it was: two computer programmers get zapped into an unfinished video game and have to rescue a princess from a villain. It was a low-rent parody in the exact mold of every other pop-culture porn parody of the era — some costumes, some gestures at a plot, and not much else.
The production was a mess in a way that's almost endearing. The original backer, Sin City Entertainment, bailed partway through. Midnight Video stepped in to finish funding it, but on conditions: trim the 37-page script, cut the shoot from three days to two, and — because the resulting cut was too long to release as one film — split it into two movies. Total reported budget was around $20,000. By Jeremy's own account, Adams genuinely tried to ape the structure of the source material, knew Mario "inside and out," and treated it as a real parody rather than a throwaway.
The legend, and why it's so easy to believe
Then comes the famous part: Nintendo, the story goes, caught wind of the films and bought the rights to both outright, with the specific intent of halting distribution permanently. Bought, and buried.
It's an extremely believable story, and that's the trap. Nintendo's reputation for ferociously protecting its intellectual property is legendary and well-earned — this is the same company that, in a separate and fully documented 1999 incident, saw a Japanese artist arrested over an erotic Pikachu doujinshi that Nintendo called "destructive of the Pokémon image." A company that aggressive buying up a Mario porno to make it disappear fits the brand perfectly. It's exactly the kind of thing Nintendo would do. Which is precisely why almost nobody stops to ask whether it actually happened.
The part the listicles skip
Here's what the trivia roundups leave out. The primary source for "Nintendo bought the rights" is, essentially, Ron Jeremy. His official website states that the films aren't available because Nintendo purchased the rights to halt distribution, and he repeated the account in a Vice interview, saying he only discovered it when a distribution company tried to license his back catalog and found those two titles already locked up and attributed to Nintendo.
That's the whole evidentiary chain. Nintendo has never publicly confirmed it. There's no public court record or press release anchoring it. When Snopes looked into the claim, its conclusion was not "true" — it was that it could not be conclusively proven true or false. So what we actually have is a plausible, persistent, on-brand story sourced almost entirely to one interested party, which the internet has spent two decades upgrading into a hard fact through sheer repetition.
The films' afterlife is documented better than the buyout is. They drifted into obscurity, got resurfaced by a Something Awful write-up in the late 2000s, and copies trickled back online — the sequel rediscovered around 2009, a rip of the first a few years later. The originals are otherwise treated as effectively lost media, which, conveniently, is just as consistent with "two cheap 1993 pornos nobody preserved" as it is with "Nintendo bought them all."
Why this one's worth telling properly
This is a perfect little case study in how gaming "facts" calcify. A claim from a single interested source, attached to a company with a reputation that makes it feel true, repeated across a thousand listicles until the uncertainty gets sanded off entirely. The honest version of this story isn't "Nintendo buried a Mario porno." It's "there are two real 1993 Mario porn parodies, and there's a famous, plausible, completely unconfirmed claim that Nintendo bought them to kill them." That's a better story, and it has the advantage of being the part that's actually true.
One footnote worth stating plainly, since it's unavoidable in 2026: Ron Jeremy's life took a genuinely dark turn well beyond bad movies — he was charged with numerous counts of rape and sexual assault and ultimately found incompetent to stand trial. The Super Hornio saga is gaming-history trivia, not a celebration of him, and it's worth keeping that distinction clear.