Johannesburg – Video games might be fictional but there are often aspects of realism included.
This is enhanced through its characters who often have their own back stories.
In a bid to have a closer look at the characters, Top10Casinos.com, which reviews and evaluates hundreds of sites to deliver the best 10 online casinos in the world, decided to imagine what some of the most acclaimed video game characters would look like in 2022.
They also took into account their occupations throughout their respective series and ranked them on how much their salary would be worth today.
The Top10Casinos.com research revealed that Waluigi is the richest video game character, earning a whopping £6 200 000 (R120 million) a year as CEO of a motor oil company.
Although his earnings and company name were never declared, Top10Casinos.com compared him to Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden, who earlier this year had his annual salary increased by 26% from benefits and bonuses.
The second richest character to join this list is Wario, who earns $2 100 000 (£2,048,460) a year as head of WarioWare Inc. Top10Casinos.com compared his earnings to Nintendo CEO Shuntato Furukawa whose earnings were revealed last fiscal year. Waluigi and Wario are both CEOs of successful companies, so it makes sense that these two earned their place in the top two of the results.
In third place is Princess Peach, earning $475,460 (£423 164.15) being a Princess. The Super Mario universe is set in the Toadstool Kingdom, with the real-life equivalent being Norway, with both countries bearing rolling hills, mountains, longer-than-usual sunny days and castles.
Top10Casinos found that the Norwegian Royal Family earn approximately $475 460 a year, but seeing as there were no mentions of Peach’s family through the Mario franchise, it can be assumed that she would pocket this all to herself.
In joint seventh place are Mario and Luigi, who we all know as Plumbers, even though Luigi hunted ghosts and Mario was a doctor and Olympic athlete throughout the franchise.
The current base Plumber's salary is £32 000, but salaries can increase depending on the amount of work completed.
Meanwhile, trailing at the bottom of the top 10 is the iconic Pikachu from the Pokémon franchise. Pikachu was once a detective in Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, so it seems fit to give Pikachu that occupation.
Private detectives in Europe earn approximately €46 650 a year, making Pikachu the least-rich character in this list, but there is no salary worth fighting other Pokémon.
In order to compile the study, Top10Casinos.com conducted research to discover the biological ages of the most notable video game characters. A seed list of the 12 most popular characters was acquired from high authority domains and the character profile was then used to collate the estimated in-game ages of each character.
Subsequently, using the initial release year of each respective video game, the estimated biological age of the characters was calculated. Each character’s occupation was taken from Mario Wiki, and estimated earnings data was sourced from Zippia, Yahoo, Jobted, and other sources, and was sourced for the US, the UK and Europe.
Top10Casinos.com said that where earnings data wasn't found, currency conversions were made from USD, GBP and EUR using the Google Finance formula, based on real-time conversion rates, so these are subject to change. The data is accurate as of October 25 2022 and is subject to change.