40 things you (probably) didn't know about Mario

March 10th is a big day in the Nintendo calendar. March 10, Mar10, Mar-IO? Geddit? It’s-a Mario Day! And this year’s celebration marks a particularly big anniversary in the life of the mustachioed super-plumber.

Why? It’s 40 years since the release of the first Super Mario Bros. game on the NES, the first platforming entry into the world’s most-recogniseable gaming franchise. The first Super Mario Bros game came out way back in 1985, which makes the core series some 40 years old now — with Mario himself making his debut in 1981’s Donkey Kong under the Jumpman moniker. That's four decades and change of the pipes, jumps and Kooper crushing we all know and love today.

Super Mario Bros. the game may be old enough now to have kids, be divorced and looking towards a mid-life crisis, but there's still plenty some don't know about this iconic gaming hero.

And with the Nintendo Switch 2 soon to be released there has never been a better time to get to know everyone’s favourite Italian plumber.

From his Italian roots to his original theme song, to mark the 40th anniversary since the first Super Mario game came out, here are 40 things you probably didn't know about Mario, his brother Luigi and one of the greatest video game franchises ever created...

1. Mario's Original Name

Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto nearly called his famed character 'Mr Video', speculating it would be a name he'd return to with each and every title. In his first appearance in 1981's Donkey Kong, he was known only as 'Jumpman', given his ability to jump over barrels.

2. Mario’s namesake was Mario Seagle, the landlord of Nintendo’s American warehouse

Imagine telling your grandkids you were the Mario of, well, Mario… That’s exactly what Mario Seagle can say. Don James, warehouse manager, confirmed that Mario Seagle was the landlord for Nintendo’s American warehouse, and Arakawa named his character after him as a joke because Seagle was so reclusive that none of the employees had actually ever met him.

"We thought it would be funny to name the game character ‘Mario’ and quickly agreed it sounded great. So we informed our parent company and that’s how Mario got his name."

3. A Man Of Many Trades

Mario didn't start out as a plumber, but as a carpenter. For his first appearance in Donkey Kong it was decided that a manual labour job would make him a more appealing character.

It wasn't until 1983's Mario Bros. that Mario would be depicted as a plumber, given the game's underground location.

In his 35 years of gaming Mario has also been depicted as a bottler (Mario Bros Game & Watch), a loader (Mario's Cement Factory), a soldier (Mario's Bombs Away), a wrecker (Wrecking Crew), a referee (Mike Tyson's Punch-Out) and a doctor (Doctor Mario).

4. Not So Loveable?

Mario is pretty much permanently seen as a good guy - perhaps in part owing to the innocent dungarees and cheerful Italian catchphrases. But this hasn't always been the case. In the 1982 Donkey Kong Jr game, Mario was actually a villain. This sequel was centered around Mario's apparent desire for revenge against Donkey Kong, who he had trapped in a cage and beat (!). The objective was for the eponymous Donkey Kong Jr to free his father from imprisonment.

5. The cause of that iconic outfit

There's a deeper purpose behind Mario's look, as Shigeru Miyamoto told ShortList: "...when you designed characters, you had a space that was 16 squares by 16, so creating a normally proportioned person just wasn’t fun. So I started with a really big face, and then decided to fill in the body. I couldn’t really design a mouth, so I made the nose big and covered it with a moustache. And we couldn’t really depict hair, which is why I put a hat on him."

The overalls also helped, allowing Mario's arms to be a different colour to the rest of his body, and thus make it easier to distinguish their movement.

6. The Italian Job

Mario's Italian background didn't solidify until the release of Mario Bros. in 1983.

As the game had a multiplayer aspect, it was decided that Mario should have an Italian brother, sharing a similar name - literally. "Because Mario’s name was there, we asked the American team to come up with some Italian names and Luigi was one of the candidates," explains Miyamoto. "In Japan, Luigi is a familiar name, but it also happens to have the same sound as the Japanese word meaning ‘similar’, so it was perfect."

The game was set in New York's sewer system, where the Italian plumbers battled against all manner of strange creatures invading its pipes.

8. The Princess and the Peach

While the Japanese have always known Princess Peach by the same name, she's had a several different identities for Western audiences.

Marketed as Princess Toadstool when Super Mario Bros. first arrived in Europe and America, she only gained her 'Peach' title when the English translation of Yoshi's Safari arrived in 1993.

9. The Hero That Never Was

Before setting about creating Donkey Kong, Shigeru Miyamoto was looking to create a title around the character Popeye.

Nintendo and King Features Syndicate - owners of the Popeye brand - were working on a deal, but an agreement was never reached. Miyamoto tweaked his ideas, casting a gorilla in the role of Bluto, Pauline as Olive Oyl and Jumpman/Mario as Popeye.

10. Mutant Turtles

Bowser is a turtle, not a dragon (despite breathing fire and living in a castle).

However, Miyamoto's first drawings of Mario's foe had him cast as an ox. Nintendo designer Takashi Tezuka pointed out that Miyamoto's drawings were more like a turtle than an ox, and the two set about redesigning him.

11. Write the theme, sing the theme tune

This might come as a surprise, but there are actually lyrics to the Super Mario Bros. theme tune.

Takashi Tezuka (Super Mario Bros designer) came up with lyrics for Koji Kondo's iconic music. There was a discussion about putting them in the video game's manual, but they never appeared. Here's a sample of them...

Today, full of energy, Mario is still running, running
Go save Princess Peach! Go!
Today, full of energy, Mario runs
Today, full of energy, jumping!
Today, full of energy, searching for coins
Today, keep going, Mario!

Get a mushroom - it's Super Mario!
Get a flower - it's Fire Mario!

Goomba! Troopa! Buzzy Beetle! Beat them all!
Mario is always full of energy and strong!

You can hear it sung in full here. It's weird.

12. The Face Lift

Super Mario Bros. 2 didn't start life as a Mario game. The Japanese sequel to Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels - was deemed too difficult for Western players. As such, Nintendo borrowed the mechanics and design of Doki Doki Panic - a Fuji Television game they had a licencing deal with.

The characters were altered to give Mario, Luigi, Toad and Peach roles in the game, along with several graphical changes. The game was later re-released to a Japanese audience as Super Mario USA.

13. The Taller Brother

In their first appearances, Mario and Luigi were identical in size - Luigi being distinguished by a different colour pallet.

He was only made taller than Mario due to Super Mario Bros. 2 borrowing Doki Doki Panic's character designs: Luigi replaced the character Maa, who was taller than Mario's base character Imajin.

Confusingly, Luigi reverted back to Mario's height for Super Mario Bros. 3.

14. The Dark History Of The Chain Chomp

The inspiration behind these tethered foe harks back to an episode from Miyamoto's childhood, when a neighbour's dog chased the young designer before it was yanked back by its chain.

15. A grand farewell

While many Western gamers will be familiar with Super Mario Bros. as a NES launch title, the game was actually set to be a final chapter in the console's history.

The cartridge-based Nintendo Entertainment System had been out in Japan for nearly two-and-a-half years before Super Mario Bros. was launched, and Nintendo was looking to replace the console with a new disk system. The game became the console's most successful title, helping it establish a foothold in the US and European markets.

16. A Play Within A Play

Prepare for your mind to be blown. Super Mario Bros. 3 isn't a game at all. It's a play - a stage performance, with Mario in no real peril at all. Miyamato confirmed that the game's curtain, hanging stage blocks and flat worlds are actually all pointing toward the game being a "stage performance".

We don't know what to believe any more.

17. Press 'up' to jump

Those well-timed A button moments were a late edition to the build of Super Mario Bros.

Initial designs had Mario wielding more weaponry (even a beam rifle at one point), and the A button was given over to an "attack" function, while up was for jumping

Mercifully, the game became more of a platformer and less of a scrolling action shooter.

18. Head In The Bushes

The clouds and bushes of Super Mario Bros. actually use the same 'sprite' design - they just use different colour pallets. The bushes appear more plant-like thanks to hiding their lower section out of sight.

19. Passive-Aggressive Ghost

The inspiration behind Boo is actually a touch... mean? Miyamoto told Nintendo Power Magazine that the character was actually based on animator Osamu Tezuka's wife: "Mr. Tezuka got an idea about putting his wife in the game. His wife is very quiet normally, but one day she exploded, maddened by all the time he spent at work. In the game, there is now a character who shrinks when Mario looks at it, but when Mario turns away, it will grow large and menacing."

20. Sound familiar?

The Game, A Thousand Men and a Baby, The Californians - these are just some of the films that Charles Martinet, Mario's voice actor, has appeared in.

Martinet has lent his vocal skills to Mario's appearance since 1995, also voicing Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, Toadsworth, Baby Mario, Baby Luigi, Donkey Kong.

21. Better Than All The Rest

The most successful Mario title of all time? Mario Kart 8 Deluxewhich has shipped over 60 million copies to date.

22. Better late than never

Shigeru Miyamoto had wanted to include an animal companion for Mario for a NES game, but Nintendo’s programmers couldn't get the concept to function with the NES’ limited capabilities.

Yoshi was originally going to be a Koopa, but a dinosaur design was later settled one. His first appearance was in 1990's Super Mario World.

23. It's His Fist

Right - this video from Miyamoto settles one of the longest-running debates in Mario lore: Mario has always broken bricks with his fist, not his head. Just like Maradona against England in 1986.

Now drop it.

24. The Ultimate Addiction

The original testers of Super Mario Bros. were more than a little impressed with the game.

"It went down well with the internal testers," said Miyamoto. "It was a different feeling than the one we experienced with Donkey Kong – the testers who were playing Super Mario Bros. just didn’t go home. They stayed really late into the night just to play it."

25. Dawn Of 3D

Along with racer F-Zero, the original Super Mario Kart helped pave the way toward 3D video games.

The game used a system called Mode 7 graphics, which allowed the flat backgrounds to be rotated around a single point and scaled, making the game appear to be three dimensional.

26. The Face of the Video Games

Mario has 24 mainline games in total, while also appearing in nearly 250 games overall, with spin-offs like Mario Kart and Smash Bros being noticeable inclusions. This also means the character has appeared in the recent games more than any other mascot. Best of all, he’s not slowing down, with the next Mario Kart game already on the way – he may be 40, but there’s no doubting his work ethic.

27. Donkey Kong itself was a conversion from another game – and the efforts of a Nintendo executive trying not to get fired by his father-in-law

After becoming a firm-success in Japan, Hiroshi Yamauchi - Nintendo’s then President - was desperate to break into the global market, and hired his son-in-law, Arakawa to help with this - much to his daughter’s dismay. Yamauchi was notorious for firing his own family, so when Arakawa’s first game Radar Scope wasn’t selling, he created a company competition to create a conversion kit for the game. The winner of this competition was Shigeru Miyamoto with his Manga-inspired Mario creation, and the rest was history.

28. Mario’s nemesis got his name from a soup

Not the thing that classically springs to mind when you think of evil, but the game’s primary villain, Bowser, was originally called “Koopa” or “Kuppa’” in earlier games and “Daimaō Koopa” in the original Japanese. Miyamoto has said in interviews that the name Kuppa came from the Japanese name for a Korean dish, gukbap, a soupy stew served with rice.

29. Mario has starred in every sport except American football

Mario Sports Superstars features soccer, baseball, tennis, golf, and even horse racing. Before, there was Mario Sports Mix which featured basketball, volleyball, dodgeball, and hockey. Despite being in all the sports listed - and even boxing thanks to Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympics - Mario has never been given the chance to score a touchdown. But 10 sports seems like more than enough exercise to be getting on with.

30. The OG Donkey Kong is actually Cranky Kong

Mario has faced off against more than one generation of simian nemeses. According to the game's official manual, Cranky "is actually the original Donkey Kong who starred in the many Donkey Kong arcade classics of the 80's." The main thing differentiating the two Kongs is that the original one didn't wear a necktie.

31. Luigi's Mansion box art (deliberately) resembles Home Alone

Both iconic, both beloved, Luigi’s Mansion box art mirrors the famous screaming face, with smiling villains surrounding it in a nod to the infamous 1990 film, and of course the famous Edvard Munch painting.

32. Super Mario has its own Manga dating back to 1991

One year after Super Mario World was released, Japanese manga magazine CoroCoro Comic started publishing the manga title Super Mario Kun. It covers all the games in the franchise and mirrors the fun, goofy tone of the games. Despite launching in 1991, the first English translation was released in December 2020, with a second collection released in 2023. It currently has 61 volumes - and counting!

33. Mario has a new voice actor after 30 years

The Mario voice actor changed in 2023 for the first time in 30 years. Charles Martinet stepped down after first voicing the character in 1991 – for many, the first time hearing Mario’s voice would have been in Mario 64 (excluding the failed 1993 live-action adaptation). The first game with new voice actor, Kevin Afghani, where he voiced both Mario and Luigi was Mario Wonder.

34. Mario was involved with the invention of the D-pad

Nowadays, the D-pad is taken for granted, reduced to the less cool older brother of the analogue stick, which is now more prominently used for movement in most games. The cross-shaped D-pad now found on most controllers was first introduced on the Donkey Kong Game & Watch, in one of the earliest games in which Mario was playable, back when he was still called Jumpman.

35. Super Mario is also the star of the highest-grossing video game adaptation of all time

It was only a matter of time before a Mario film was released and got it right — the 1993 live-action adaptation being a curio best left forgotten. Despite the initial reaction to Chris Pratt being cast as the voice of everyone’s favourite mustachioed plumber, the animated film was a huge success – released in 2023, it’s the only film adaptation of a video game to surpass a billion dollars.

36. Mario closed the 2016 Olympic games in Rio, Brazil

After appearing in multiple Olympic-themed video games, it only made sense for him to be part of the baton pass from Brazil to Japan at the end of the 2016 Olympics. A video first played, introducing the Japanese Prime Minister at the time, Shinzo Abe stuck in traffic before transforming into Mario himself to jump in a pipe and get to Rio quickly. He then appeared out of a pipe dressed in the iconic Mario hat at the event – adding a whole new meaning to getting the tube in the process.

37. Wario’s name has a hidden Japanese meaning

One of Mario’s main antagonists - Wario - is a clever mash-up of the name Mario and the Japanese word Warui, which translates to bad or evil.

38. The first Mario LEGO was released in 2020

LEGO released its first Mario inspired set in 2020, with a Mushroom Kingdom themed set - perfect for beginners. It featured Mario and the iconic green warp pipes, but there have since been many more LEGO sets including the Piranha plant, Mighty Bowser, Super Mario World: Mario & Yoshi, and Mario Kart Yoshi Bike.

39. No-one is 100% sure what Mario's last name is

In 2012, Mario voice-over actor Charles Martinet said that Mario’s last name was in fact Mario - making him Mario Mario (catchy). However Nintendo CEO at the time Satoru Iwata said Mario had no last name, which Miyamoto agreed with. However, two months after Iwata’s death in 2015, Miyamoto changed his opinion, saying that Mario’s full name was indeed Mario Mario at the Super Mario Bros 30th Anniversary festival. So who knows, really.

40. His Shakespearean inspiration

When first workshopping and honing the voice that suited Mario, Charles Martinet used a voice from another role he had played - namely, the character Gremio in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

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