Someone made a gorgeous video of what Super Mario would look like with the latest gaming graphics

Nintendo hasn't been on the bleeding edge of video game hardware for many, many years. And that's fine!

Its Wii console was a roaring success, despite being less powerful than the competition. The Japanese gaming powerhouse has proven time after time that game players care more about how games play than how they look. And hey, the latest Super Mario game - "Super Mario 3D World" - was gorgeous. Just look at this adorable cat suit gameplay:

Despite Nintendo's move into high-definition gaming with its latest console, the Wii U, the company's games can't compete visually with what Sony and Microsoft offer. Games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" simply aren't possible on the Wii U:

CD Projekt RED

"The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" is only available on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The Nintendo Wii U isn't capable of running it.

Instead, Nintendo plays to its strengths in art design. Its newest franchise, "Splatoon," is very pretty in its own right:

Nintendo

"Splatoon" is Nintendo's first new franchise in years, and it's excellent.

But that of course begs the question: what might Nintendo's classic characters look like on more powerful hardware, perhaps within a more powerful game engine than what's capable of running on the Wii U? 

3D artist Aryok Pinera has an amazing answer to that question: he put Super Mario inside the incredibly powerful Unreal Engine 4 in a YouTube video titled "Mario is Unreal":

If this is an indication of what Mario might look like on the next generation of Nintendo hardware, we're looking forward to that future with great interest. According to Nintendo, we'll hear more about the company's next system - currently codenamed the "NX" - at some point in 2016.