Back in the day it was only three years and Nintendo decided that they would make a aggressive move towards the American Video Game Market. It really proved to be a complete disaster since the came they were pushing was a much hyped arcade shooter called Radar Scope which only sold thousand units out of three thousand built.
There was a man by the name of Minoru Arakawa who asked his father in law who was Nintendo’s CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi to reprogram the bad Radar scope Leftovers to a new game! Witout anything to lose they decided to go ahead and do this. They went ahead and contacted a young graphic designer Shigeru Myamoto and a Successful game creator Gunpei Yokoi.
So for basically the first time they created a story first and they they decided to create the gameplay around the story. They decided to go ahead and base the plot of the story on a type of love triangle between a giant gorilla and jumpman and Lady! Jumpman eventually came to be Mario! Who at the time was just a carpentor that would leap barrels and scale a construction site to save the fair lady. Miyamoto wanted to game to progress through a progression of different stages and he didn’t want the game to be the same over and over 4 different times. They basically didn’t want the same level over and over!
Beleive it or not they delivered a 20000 lines of code and miyamoto went ahead and created the music and designed the in between scenes also known as intermissions between each level to bring out the story even more. Keep in mind that this all had to stay within the limitations of the previously failed game Radar Scope.
When all the chip conversions were sent to the US in the early 1980’s. They realized that the name Jumpman just was going to appeal to an american audience so they diced to come up with a name. The story goes that at that very moment his landlord Mario Segali burst into his board meeting demanding overdue rent!
So this is where the name Mario Came from!
Now 26 years later Super Mario is the face of nintendo and basically one of the most recognizable faces in gaming. He is even more recognized that walt Disneys Micky mouse. Mario has actually appreared in over 200 video games and there have been tons of orchestras playing his theme music. Sadly even a Action film was created as well. (we’ll just try and forget that ever happened)
So before Super Mario was the face of NES, the original Donkey kong was a gigantic success. it literally shipped 60k cabs and all this was because the of famous Donkey KONG!! Mario was just that dude you used to save lady. … poor mario. Mario eventually became a villain in the 1983 classic DONKEY KONG JR.
It was geared that mario would be the all purpose character for Nintendo. It would be so easy to have Nintendo use him for any game since there were limitations on the original 8 bit platform. It basically came down to what was actually capable of being created on the old NES. (Nintendo Entertainment System). So they actually gave him a mustache and a big nose and some overalls!
Since being a carpenter didn’t exactly fit his character Miyamoto took the advice of a friend and actually made his story and game around the idea that Mario was a Plumber! Supposedly the different characters in Super Mario Brothers were based around the game joust where players could work as a team so he went ahead and created marios bother LUIGI by swapping out his color pattern.
Supposedly Luigi acquired his namesake from a the Japanese word for Analogous and ended up getting the names Mario and Luigi because of a Pizza place near Arakawas location of where he worked at the time. either way they ended up defeating sewer bad guys and bad little turtles and crabs mario Brothers! This game was ok, I played it myself. It really wasn’t anything like the old side scroller on the NES but it was decent to play in the arcade at the time.
Now Nintendo realized that they needed to get into the video game console market and they only way that they were going to do that was to create games that were worth playing. Nothing would be better than having the best game designer in the entire planet help them accomplish this. They decided to take Mario and Luigi out of the plumbing and bring them over to the fabulous mushroom kingdom. all this occurred in the new console Famicon!
The reason that the super mario games were so unique was the fact that Miyamoto really was a artistic designer by trade so when he created a game he basically was creating something to explore and look great at the same time. So as you are beginning to realize there were lots of experimenting in the game such as hidden rooms and secret items that were all throughout the game. Which as you know the REST WAS HISTORY!
Just remember if you ever played this game you can tell all the work that went into the games. Whether it was a fire ball throwing mario and luigi or the invincibility star, or even just the colorful levels and music it really stood out from the rest of the crowd of mediocre games at the time. It really was amazing.
I late 1985 Nintendo renamed the Famicon to the Nintendo Entertainment System and it was distributed in America in a bunch of different ways. one version even included a robot R.O.B. which didn’t come with super mario at the time. Now by this time most people actually dismissed the game system and thought that it would basically fail. The obvious thing was that it didn’t! Fortunately it blew up like crazy and the word spread like wild fire.
People were finding out that the Nintendo was way better than the Atari and it also had a Fantasically Brilliant game to come with it.
You basically took your little plumber through out the mushroom kingdom and then eventually you would fight bowser!The cool thing was that you could sort of relate to Mario because he was a working guy just like the rest of us, who was not in this magical land trying to save the princess.
Super Mario Bros was an awesome game and nothing like it at the time even came close. All in all Nintendo saved video games. the 1983 Video game crash was done with and there was a Fantastic new hero to play forever!
From there the Fabulous Super Mario Bros 2 was created and then one of my personal favorites was Super Mario 3 which was completely unique and one of the best games ever created in my personal opinion!
This is why it is so important to look at mario and realize that Nintendo created a whole new culture for kids and that without their genius we probably would still be years behind in our gaming systems!