Unlike other popular brands from the 1980s, Super Mario has endured, with more iterations of the game offered continually. Like other forms of video games, Super Mario commands various cognitive and motor skills, thus contributing to brain plasticity. Super Mario has inspired a corpus of psychology research. Here are seven interesting findings from studies involving everyone’s favorite mustachioed plumber.

German researchers compared gray matter volume in a control group versus a gaming group that trained on Super Mario for two months, for at least 30 minutes per day. They found that playing Super Mario augmented gray matter in areas responsible for spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory, and motor performance.