Miyamoto created a brother for Mario (the green-clad Luigi) and the pair debuted in the 1983 arcade game 'Mario Bros.,' which was mainly only distributed in Japan.

Nintendo went on develop several sequels to the original before tasking Miyamoto with breaking out the Mario character for his own game. 'Donkey Kong' was extremely popular in arcades around the world, earning the game its own spot in the pantheon of classic video games. 'They started calling the character Mario, and when I heard that I said 'Oh, Mario's a great name - let's use that,'' Miyamoto told NPR in 2015. Workers at Nintendo's Washington warehouse had started calling the character 'Mario' because he resembled the property's landlord, a man named Mario Segale, according to the book 'Game Over, Press Start to Continue.' Miyamoto heard about the nickname and liked it, so he stuck with it. When Nintendo released 'Donkey Kong' in the United States, the company's American executives felt that Jumpman needed a better name. Miyamoto wanted to create a game based on the iconic cartoon sailor Popeye, but Nintendo wasn't able to land the rights to those characters, so the artist had to come up with a new idea. Miyamoto, an artist who had been hired at Nintendo four years earlier for his skills as a toymaker, was tasked with coming up with a new arcade game to replace Nintendo's failed 1980 title 'Radar Scope,' according to a 2010 profile of Miyamoto in The New Yorker.

(Mario didn't become a plumber until four years later, when Miyamoto decided that Mario's profession should better match the green pipes and sewer settings of the 'Mario Bros.' franchise.) Legendary video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto ('Donkey Kong,' 'The Legend of Zelda,' 'Star Fox') actually first created the Mario character to be the protagonist of 'Donkey Kong,' the 1981 arcade game where a carpenter tries to rescue his girlfriend from a giant ape who was Mario's pet.

In fact, the game's titular character - Mario, a mustachioed plumber in overalls and a red cap - went on to become Nintendo's unofficial mascot, appearing in more than 200 different video game properties, from 'Mario Kart' to 'Mario Party,' and making the company's large portfolio of Mario-themed games the best-selling video game franchise ever.īut, if the Nintendo game designer who first created Mario had his way, the character might never have existed - or, at least, he would have been very different.

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