One of the most iconic characters in video game history, Super Mario made his eerie debut in 1981. He wasn’t much: a few colorful pixels on a grainy screen, a character trying to save his girlfriend from a giant monkey named Donkey Kong. But by the time the 1990s came along, Mario hadn’t just rescued lovers from the clutches of monkey kidnappers, he’d also become the face of Nintendo.
It all started a century ago, in 1889, when Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a small company called Nintendo Koppai to manufacture Hanafuda cards, a popular type of playing card commonly used in gambling. (The word Nintendo roughly means “leaving one’s luck to heaven,” or a place where fate is left in the hands of the gods.) The business thrived for decades — Nintendo is still one of the world’s largest Hanafuda manufacturers — but when Yamauchi’s grandson, Hiroshi, took over in 1949, he looked for ways to diversify the company’s revenue sources.
The young Yamauchi tried some pretty unconventional business ideas: instant rice packs, a “love hotel” for romantic couples, a taxi company, and other failures. He finally found a new niche for Nintendo in the late 1960s, gaining a foothold in the Japanese electronic toy market. Seeing the phenomenal success of home computer and arcade company Atari in the 1970s, Hiroshi next turned his attention to the video game market, and in 1977 Nintendo released the home video game console Color TV-Game to the Japanese market.
The console came with multiple versions of the same game pre-installed, the first being Nintendo’s version of Pong, one of the most popular games at the time, which was a modest success for the company, selling around 3 million copies over the next three years. .
Hungry for more, Yamauchi turned to another thriving industry: video games that gobbled up quarter-dollar coins. Encouraged by the success of EVR Racing and Radarscope in Japan, Nintendo produced 3,000 Radarscope machines for distribution in the United States. Unfortunately, American arcade sellers found the game too similar to Space Invaders and were annoyed by the annoying beeps and noises that constantly came from the machine’s speakers during gameplay. Yamauchi was left with nearly 2,000 unsold Radarscope machines, and the company’s North American hopes seemed over.
Donkey Kong Introduces a Future Icon
Yamauchi went back to square one. He asked product developer and artist Shigeru Miyamoto to create a game that would be more appealing to Americans and reach the heights that “Radar Scope” hadn’t.
Miyamoto had an advantage other video game developers didn’t have: He wasn’t a programmer. Rather than approaching a project in terms of what the hardware could do, as most developers at the time did, the 28-year-old focused first on story.
After exploring several ideas, he settled on one inspired by the American comic and cartoon character Popeye. But rather than Bluto and Popeye fighting over the love of olive oil, Miyamoto’s game was about a carpenter named Jumpman who must rescue his girlfriend Pauline from the clutches of a giant gorilla kidnapper named Donkey Kong. (They felt that the name conveyed the notion of a “stupid gorilla.”)
Before the release of Donkey Kong in 1981, Nintendo of America rented a warehouse in the Seattle area (where the radar scope was gathering dust) owned by a man named Mario Segale. Having invested much of the company’s resources in the development of “Donkey Kong,” the company fell behind on its rent payments. That’s when the cranky Segale made an angry visit to President Minoru Arakawa and demanded payment. Arakawa assured the landlord that the rent would be paid promptly. When Segale finally left, Arakawa had a realization: he and his team began jokingly calling their pixelated creation Mario Bos5000.
‘Jumpman’ Becomes Mario—and an Empire Is Born
Donkey Kong was a huge success, but the company didn’t put down its joystick or celebrate its victory. They quickly developed and released a sequel called Donkey Kong Jr., in which Donkey Kong’s son tries to free his father from the evil clutches of the character formerly known as Jumpman, but now named Mario. Despite Mario being the “villain” (for the first and only time in his career), the game was another huge success for Nintendo.
In 1983, Mario finally got his chance to be a star when, together with his brother Luigi (now known as The Plumbers of New York), they were tasked with defeating numerous creatures trying to become stars in the smash-hit arcade game “Mario Brothers.” The game was released in 2013, and is still in production today.
On July 15, 1983, Nintendo (and Mario) left arcades for the first time and conquered millions of living rooms with the release of the Family Computer (or Famicom for short) home video game console in Japan. Sales skyrocketed domestically, and after a year of market testing in some parts of the United States, the renamed and redesigned Nintendo Entertainment System for the American market was launched nationwide in September 1986. The system launched with 17 games available, including a new one starring everyone’s favorite plumber: Super Mario Bros.
By 1988, Nintendo had a firm grip on the American console market, and Super Mario Bros. was automatically included in later versions of the NES. The inclusion of made the character even more of a connection to the company.
But why did Mario become such a phenomenon? According to Jeff Ryan, author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America, it’s essentially because Nintendo catapulted him to stardom.
“Nintendo made him a star,” Ryan said. “They purposefully put him in a string of innovative video games, constantly launching him from genre to genre.”
In the 1980s alone, Mario appeared in 12 NES games. In many cases, it wasn’t essential to the plot. He appeared as a referee in “Tennis” (1985), a golfer in “Golf” (1985), a protagonist in “The Wrecking Crew” (1985), a referee in “Punch-Out!!” (1987), and in other seemingly forced roles in “Tetris” (1988) and “Pinball” (1985). In short, Nintendo made Mario a symbol of quality control. When Mario stamped his stamp on a game, you knew it was going to be good.
“For comparison, imagine if the most popular TV series of the last 30 years was a Happy Days spinoff series about Fonzie,” Ryan speculates. “A medical drama starring Fonzie. A police crime thriller starring Fonzie. A split-screen tale of female friendship with a wigged Fonzie. ‘Potsie’s got a talent.’”
In the decades since emerging from the shadows of the oversized ape known as Donkey Kong, Mario has appeared in more than 200 games. The Mario Bros. series alone has sold over 240 million copies, and Nintendo has released several sequels to the original for various generations of consoles.
Despite the industry’s constant pursuit of more “realistic” gaming experiences, Mario’s decidedly low-tech battles with the giant, spiky-shelled turtle known as Bowser have endured for over 30 years and remain one of the most popular games in history.
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