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Mario

Concept and creation

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario

History

Shigeru Miyamoto, shortly after graduating the Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts with a degree in industrial design, began working at the toy company Nintendo, who had recently begun to experiment with arcade cabinets. A hobbyist of art and toy design, he demonstrated some of his self-made toys to then Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, and was hired as the company's first art designer.

When the North American subsidiary of Nintendo, Nintendo of America, was founded in 1980, the company found minor success from importing its Japan arcade cabinets. The company wanted to find international breakthrough in the arcade cabinet business, replicating success similar to Namco's Pac-Man. The anticipated success of Radar Scope—which Miyamoto helped work on—saw a shipment of 3,000 arcade units to North America, but received poor reception, resulting in Nintendo of America being in possession of over 2,000 unused cabinets. Both the company and its employees were in financial strain. Yamauchi assigned Miyamoto to convert the unused Radar Scope cabinets into a new video game that would better reach the North American market.

Miyamoto would "research" by playing arcade games; at the time he was one of the best at playing them in Nintendo and would attract crowds. He studied what gave Pac-Man and various games that replicated its gameplay, and the newly emerging side-scrolling video game genre, high replay value. He and fellow senior colleague Gunpei Yokoi deducted that it came from anger after losing, and feeling like it was the player's fault only. Using this information he drafted five gameplay designs, all of which were designed with the intention of using the licensing rights to the cartoon franchise Popeye; Nintendo had recently garnered the rights to the characters for Game & Watch titles. Yokoi, who felt designers should be integral parts in the game development process, presented the ideas directly to Yamauchi, who greenlit one of the concepts. With the license the game would have featured Popeye as the protagonist, Olive Oyl as the damsel in distress, and Bluto as the antagonist. Nintendo was unable to retrieve the rights to Popeye for the game. Although Miyamoto said it "felt like the ladder had been pulled out from under us", development for the game continued, instead with original character designs. Bluto and Olive Oyl would be substituted with Donkey Kong and Pauline respectively; Mario was Popeye's replacement.

Appearance and design

Yoshiaki Koizumi (left) and Yōichi Kotabe (right) contributed to the standardized design of Mario.

North American video games at the time had a preference proportionately-sized characters, and since the developers of Donkey Kong had only a 16x16 pixel space for the character, they struggled to design a human figure. As a designer, Miyamoto drew the character himself instead of a programmer, although he struggled as well with the strict restraints, and face designs were too large to draw a proportionate body. To counteract this, he opted to hide as many details of the character as possible with more exaggerated ones: a large nose and mustache saved on drawing a mouth, and red cap was added to let Miyamoto avoid drawing the character's hairstyle, forehead, and eyebrows, as well as to circumvent the issue of animating his hair as he jumped. Additionally, Miyamoto only had three distinct frames to create a running animation. To ensure the movement was easy to see, he wanted to make the hands and arms a different color from the body, so he gave the character overalls, as the clothing choice would call for a base shirt with the overalls covering the body. White gloves were given to the character to make jumps more identifiable. To match the character design and setting, Mario was established to be a carpenter, although he was retconned to be a plumber from Super Mario Bros. (1985) onward to match the pipe and underground staples of the franchise.

Over time, Mario's appearance has become more defined; blue eyes, white gloves, brown shoes, a red "M" in a white circle on the front of his hat and gold buttons on his overalls have been added. According to an interview, Japanese character designer Yōichi Kotabe, who worked on redesigning characters in Super Mario Bros. (1985), revealed that Mario's M on his hat was originally the resemblance of McDonald's logo; Kotabe later changed the design of M and straightened its lines to clearly distinguish the difference, despite McDonald's request to make them even more similar. The colors of his shirt and overalls were also reversed from a blue shirt with red overalls to a red shirt with blue overalls. Miyamoto attributed this process to the different development teams and artists for each game as well as advances in technology.

Mario is named after businessman Mario Segale (pictured in 2016).

Mario was planned to be named "Mr. Video". Miyamoto had envisioned reusing the character among future works, inspired by similar notions done by manga artists Fujio Akatsuka and Osamu Tezuka; alternatively, he would have the character cameo in other games, inspired by film director Alfred Hitchcock appearing briefly in all of his directed films. Miyamoto felt in retrospect that, "If he had been called "Mr. Video," he might have disappeared off the face of the earth." His name was swapped to be "Jumpman" in Japan, alluding to his jumping abilities in Donkey Kong. When the game was localized for North America, regional executives requested the name be changed. At the time, Nintendo of America employees in Washington had begun nicknaming the character "Mario" after the likeness of businessman Mario Segale, who had a confrontation with Minoru Arakawa over warehouse rent. Miyamoto had heard about the name and liked it, ratifying it globally.

Gameplay mechanics

In Mario's first appearance, Donkey Kong, his gameplay was

Voice acting

Charles Martinet voiced Mario for over 30 years before shifting to a brand ambassador position.

Mario was voiced by Charles Martinet from 1991 to 2023. When he crashed the audition, the directors were preparing to close for the night, already packing up when he arrived. He was prompted with "an Italian plumber from Brooklyn"; when he heard the phrase, he immediately thought of a stereotypical Italian accent with a voice similar to that of a mobster. He then assumed the voice would be too harsh for children, so he planned on using a voice of an older figure. However, according to Martinet, the audition for Mario was the only time where his thoughts crashed and he spoke complete nonsense. After he was prompted the character, he stated the following in a soft and friendly voice instead:

"Hello, ima Mario. Okey dokey, letsa make a pizza pie together, you go get somea spaghetti, you go geta some sausage, I getta some sauce, you gonna put some spaghetti on the sausage and the sausage on the pizza, then I'm gonna chasea you with the pizza, then you gonna chasea me with the pizza, and gonaa makea lasagne."

— Transcript via Kotaku

The voice he chose was derived from another voice role he used to play the character Gremio from William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Martinet kept speaking with the voice until the audition tape ran out; the clip was the only tape sent back to Nintendo, and when the director called the company he said he "found our Mario". For the following years he would use the voice for an attraction at trade shows: small tracking sensors were glued onto his face, and he would voice a 3D model of Mario's head on a television while he remained hidden behind a curtain. When attendees would approach the screen, they could talk and interact with Mario. The attraction was successful and would be used for five years until he was called by Miyamoto, requesting that he use the voice for a video game.

His first official video game voice role would be the CD rerelease of Mario Teaches Typing in 1994, but his first major voice acting role was Super Mario 64. He received instructions on the types of sound clips needed from Miyamoto, and Martinet appreciated the fun tone of the game and later called Miyamoto a genius. He has since also continued to voice other various Mario characters, such as Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi. His time in the studio recording voice clips consisted of "45 takes of every sound [he] can think of", according to Martinet at a Q&A in Canada. What time he gives vocals for the game varies, and according to him has ranged from three years before a game's release to one week. The amount of clips varies as well, ranging from one hour of audio to 20. Martinet was recognized by the Guinness World Records for the most roles performed with the same character, at the time one hundred, and is the most of any video game voice actor. As of January 2022, he has voiced Mario in over 150 games and has recorded 5 million audio files with the voice. In an interview, Martinet said he wants to continue voicing the character until he "drops dead", or until he can no longer perform the voice accurately. In August 2023, Nintendo announced Martinet would be retiring from the voice role of Mario, though he would continue to promote the franchise as a "Mario Ambassador". Voice actor Kevin Afghani succeeded Martinet in Super Mario Bros. Wonder the following October.