A 25th-anniversary celebration is in the pipeline for Mario
When Shigeru Miyamoto, then an artist at Nintendo, drew a short, stubby character to serve as the hero in arcade game Donkey Kong in 1981, little did he know the mustachioed Mario would leap right into pop culture.
Since then, Mario has appeared in more than 200 games.
“I personally wanted to keep on using Mario as a character in a lot of the different games I thought I would be creating going forward,” Miyamoto said in a recent interview. “Did I think he would become this well known and familiar to people? No.”
Miyamoto and Nintendo are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., Mario’s most popular game รณ and the best-selling video game ever until Wii Sports in 2009. There are new red Wii systems ($200, with New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Wii Sports included), DSi XL handhelds ($180 with Mario Kart DS) and Wii remotes ($40). And Super Mario All-Stars, a collection of original NES Mario games upgraded for the Wii, is due Dec. 12 ($30).
“It is something for people who have a lot of fond memories,” Miyamoto says. “It also is something that is new and accessible for some of the younger players. … I just hope people will pick it up and again celebrate with us the history of the series.”
In the beginning, Miyamoto recalls, Mario was barely a character. Unlike today’s big, detailed game canvas, “Donkey Kong was a 16-by-16 (inch) screen. The character I came up with to fit that best was this little guy with a big nose and a mustache, the characteristics that would stand out in that medium.”
In fact, Mario’s first vocation was carpentry. “With Donkey Kong, this gorilla grabs this gal and runs away with her, and you have to chase the gorilla to save the lady. The game’s stage was a construction site, so we made him into basically a carpenter.” It wasn’t until Mario Bros. in 1983, which introduced brother Luigi and moved the game underground, that “we decided he could be a plumber. The scenario dictates his role.”
Mario’s fame quickly grew. “They did a popularity survey somewhere and found at that time Mario was higher on the scale than Mickey Mouse,” Miyamoto says. “I thought, personally, Mickey Mouse was a character who had been around for 40 years at that point, and (Mario) being compared to Mickey Mouse was something that I was really embarrassed about. I wasn’t comfortable with that.
“That being said, I saw the way Mickey had evolved, and we decided that Mario was going to be a character who would evolve and change with the advances in digital technology.”
Indeed, with today’s 3-D trend, there is a new, deeper Mario under construction. “We are working on a Mario product for the Nintendo 3DS. I can tell you that,” he says. “And for the first time ever, Mario will be on a handheld system with an analog stick for controls. That’s new.”
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