On the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo video game Mario Bros, and ahead of the release of a new film starring Chris Pratt, Arwa Haider explores how the plucky character Mario has gone from arcade games to Hollywood.
Back in the mid-1980s, I was thrilled to unwrap a hi-tech gift for my ninth birthday: a handheld Game + Watch version of the arcade hit Donkey Kong. I played the game obsessively, captivated by its split screen liquid-crystal display, and the simple expressiveness of its hero character: a plucky monochrome figure called Mario, who would scale a construction site to rescue a captive princess. Mario had three lives in this platform game, but an apparently infinite appeal beyond it.
Over the decades, Mario has appeared in more than 200 games, among them Nintendo's original Mario Bros (which marks its 40th anniversary in March 2023), alongside his sibling Luigi, and the Mario Kart series (1992 onwards). His adventures have inspired multi-generational merch (toys, trading cards, designer kimonos), spin-offs including new animated feature The Super Mario Bros Movie, and theme park attractions. More than any other video-gaming character, Mario has steadily powered up from an arcade sprite to a household name and pop culture icon.
Mario's now massive "everyman" presence stems from low-key beginnings. Prior to his 1981 debut in Donkey Kong, Mario had been called Ossan (Japanese for "middle-aged guy"), Mr Video and Jumpman in development; he was eventually named after the landlord of Nintendo's US HQ. His creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, referenced global pop culture influences, envisioning a protagonist that could make recurring cameos across different games, rather like Alfred Hitchcock cropping up in the movies he directed. Mario's original 8-bit design was instantly recognisable: stout, bright, bearing a distinctive cap and moustache; by the arcade release of Mario Bros (1983), his character was adapted, switching roles from carpenter to Italian-American plumber (reflecting that game's landscape of pipes, as well as Miyamoto's love of Western comics), while the controls remained intuitive.
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"I think that Mario became so popular because the actions in the Mario game are something that are innate to humans everywhere," Miyamoto told NPR in a 2015 interview. "Everyone is afraid of falling from a great height. If there is a gap that you have to cross, everyone is going to try to run to jump across… because of the simplicity of these experiences as well as the interactive nature of controlling the character and seeing the response on the game screen – that's what really resonated with people."
Mario is an unequivocal "good guy", yet his form has been intriguingly fluid. His transformative qualities (and home console fame) became apparent in the pivotal Super Mario Bros (1985), where various Mushroom Kingdom items boosted his size and abilities. In his book The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol 1 (2010), Steven L Kent describes Mario as "the elder statesman of the gaming industry", explaining that: "Super Mario Bros [1985] took Mario out of his single-screen setting and placed him in a huge vivid world… players now controlled him as he ran through a seemingly endless, brightly coloured countryside filled with caverns, castles, and giant mushrooms. The landscape was much too expansive to fit on a screen."
