CAPTIVATING CHARACTER
IF YOU’RE GOING TO CHOOSE A CHARACTER AS THE FACE OF YOUR COMPANY, YOU’D BETTER MAKE SURE HE IS APPEALING AS POSSIBLE. SHIGERU MIYAMOTO’S DESIGN HAS PROVEN TIMELESS, PROVIDING NINTENDO WITH A FACE THAT HAS SURVIVED DECADES IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Ask someone who Mario is, and there’s a good chance they’ll be able to tell you at least a little something about him.
When the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros rolled around in 2020, the Q Scores Company noted that 72% of Americans over the age of six were familiar with Mario, and that he was the most popular videogame character. It’s likely that this figure has only grown since then – after all, his 2023 movie grossed over $1.3 billion.
But Mario hasn’t always been the star that he is today. Indeed, Mario’s name didn’t even appear in the title of his debut outing, though his name wasn’t exactly a fixed matter when Donkey Kong arrived in arcades – the American operating manual for the game referred to him as Jumpman. In an Iwata Asks interview on New Super Mario Bros, Shigeru Miyamoto noted that he referred to Mario as “Mr Video,” a character intended for use across a variety of games. “Someone at Nintendo Of America actually came up with the name Mario,” he noted, and a promotional flyer does indeed call him Mario.