YouTube spotlight: Mario gets over 6 million views

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A daily spotlight on the top viral videos on www.youtube.com over the past seven days.

Gaming video " First Person Mario" is the viral video of March 23; since being added four days ago the video has attracted over 6 million views and shot up to third position on YouTube's most watched charts.

The video, uploaded by Freddiew on March 17, shows "what Mario would look like if it was a sweet-next-gen first person shooter," and according to creator Facerocker, the 3D video took over 60 hours to make using 3dsMax, FumeFX and other software.

Statistics from YouTube show that the video had attracted slightly fewer than 2.5 million views by March 18, before being featured on technology blog Engadget, which sent the video viral. Its total number of views more than doubled over the next two days; as of 2:00pm GMT on March 22, the video has attracted 6,258,099 views.

YouTube videos that are themed around or adapt well known video games have proved popular in the past. The video " First Person Shooter" - in which real people pretend to shoot each other in the style of a video game - has been one of the most successful in this genre, attracting over 13 million views since it was uploaded on December 22, 2010.