A Facebook executive at this week’s Games Developers Conference (GDC) has laid down the challenge for developers to create an ‘iconic’ title for the social media giant. There may be 30 million people tending to their sheep in ‘Farmville’ every day but it seems Facebook wants its Super Mario and it wants him now.

"The Facebook Mario is still out there," says Davis.

According to TechRadar, platform manager for the company, Gareth Davis, told Conference attendees in San Francisco that ,”the next killer game is still out there and this game will come from you”. Facebook, he said, is ready to help to host it and popularise it with research suggesting that around three quarters of Facebook’s 400 million users regularly play social games on the site.

“Social games are the past, present and future of the games industry,” said a pretty pumped up Davis, adding that, “someday soon all games will be as social as they were in the past – and we won’t call them social games, we’ll just call them games again.”

Attempting to lure the attention of developers in the crowd Davis added, “When we look at every major game platform, we see that there is an iconic defining game on that platform whether it’s Sonic or Mario or Halo. And while there are some great games on Facebook today, no one has yet produced the iconic game for [it]. The Facebook Mario is still out there.”

Beating the company drum quite loudly at this stage, Davis also said, “we are going to see multiple games with more than 100 million people playing each one. That is as many people as watched the recent Superbowl, the most watched TV programme in American history. The growth we are seeing is amazing and in a short space of time we have developed a brand new mass market audience for gaming.”

Very confident stuff from Davis alright, but considering the numbers playing games every day on Facebook it is a possibility – any suggestions for an iconic character that will impress Mark Zuckerberg and friends?