Why doesn't Mario look like he used to?

Mario is one of the most recognizable characters of all time, but would you recognize him if he

look

ed like this? or how about this? You see, Mario's design hasn't been entirely consistent over the last 40 years. When he was first created, Mario

look

ed much older. I mean, this guy looks completely different from the Mario we know now! So today I'll explain how that original design came about and why Nintendo decided to change it. Here's why Mario

doesn

't look like he

used

to! Mario is a character that should never have existed. As the famous story goes, when Nintendo released the arcade game Radar Scope, it did not have the success they expected.

So, they asked their employees to come up with ideas for a replacement game. And one of the employees who presented ideas was Shigeru Miyamoto, at the time, a new graphic designer at the company. Since Nintendo owned the video game rights to the classic Popeye cartoon series, Miyamoto came up with five Popeye-themed game ideas. Now, if you've never seen a Popeye cartoon, this main character is a sailor named Popeye, his girlfriend is named Olive Oyl, and his rival is this guy, Bluto. Then, one of Miyamoto's ideas ended up in front of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. And luckily for Miyamoto, Yamauchi really liked the game.

The plan was for Popeye to climb some construction beams and chase after his kidnapped girlfriend. It is theorized that Miyamoto's idea could have been based on this episode of the Popeye cartoons, where Popeye tries to rescue Olive Oyl after she sleepwalks on a construction site. I mean, this certainly reminds you of Donkey Kong! Anyway, just as Miyamoto and his development team were about to begin their arcade game Popeye, they received bad news. Miyamoto explained: “Although I don't remember exactly why it was like that, we couldn't use Popeye in that title. “It really felt like the ladder was taken away from us, so to speak.” Then, Nintendo lost the rights to Popeye and Miyamoto couldn't make his Popeye game.

Or could he? "We didn't know how to proceed," Miyamoto explained. "So we thought, 'Why not create our own original character?'" And so, game development resumed, with Miyamoto modifying the Popeye characters to become his own entirely new characters. Bluto, the kidnapper, became Donkey Kong, the gorilla, and Olive Oyl, the damsel in distress, became Lady, later known as Pauline. But the star of the show, Popeye...well, that was the biggest question of all. Who should be the main character of this new game? Well, Miyamoto only had a small grid of pixels to work with, so every pixel had to count.

He explained: “We had to draw Mario as a small character and at the same time, we had to make him look human. To do this, we needed to draw a distinctive feature on it, such as giving it a big nose. “We gave him a mustache so we didn’t have to draw his mouth.” The rest of this new character's appearance followed a similar logic. Large, wide arms to stand out in the context of the game. A hat so they didn't have to worry about perking up their hair. And also a monkey. I'll let Miyamoto explain: “When Mario runs, he moves his arms, but to make that movement easier to see, I thought it would be better to make his arms and his body different colors.

So I wondered if there was some kind of outfit that looked like that…” And the outfit Miyamoto thought of was a jumpsuit! And the end result was this: a simple, pixelated image of a character Miyamoto called "Jumpman." Once the pixel art was finished, Miyamoto drew a final image of what he imagined this Jumpman character should look like. The sketch of it was then passed to an illustrator, who refined it into this final design. With Jumpman alongside Donkey Kong and Lady. You can see that Jumpman looks a little strange here: he's very short, reflecting the short and stocky pixel art of him.

His mustache is big and curly, and he has strands of hair sticking out from under his hat. The basic DNA of the Mario we know and love is here, but this guy looks more like Mario's second cousin or something! So this was the first image of Jumpman, the main character of Donkey Kong. Before long, this new arcade game was shipped to Nintendo of America, where some changes were made to the game. First, Jumpman's name was changed to Mario, after Mario Segale, the head of Nintendo's American warehouse. And then, more art was created for Donkey Kong. To be clear, Miyamoto's drawings were still

used

in the arcade machine.

But Nintendo of America wanted an American illustrator to create a brochure to promote the game. First, they asked Lou Brooks to do it, since he was one of the most famous American illustrators of the time. But he told Nintendo that he was busy, however, he did have a suggestion: why don't they ask Zavier Leslie Cabarga? Now, if you haven't heard of Cabarga, he is a very famous comic book artist who worked on a ton of cartoons from the same era as Popeye. That's right, things kind of go back to Popeye! So, here's the illustration Cabarga made for the game's flyer.

As you can see, Mario looks a little different than Miyamoto's design. He's still wearing his signature jumpsuit, but he's taller, slimmer, and that messy hair from before has been replaced with sideburns. He also wears a pair of white gloves, which later became a key part of Mario's design. So in 1981, these three works of art defined how millions of people viewed Mario. Some kind of middle-aged carpenter with messy hair. But in the years that followed, that began to change. Shigeru Miyamoto's next arcade game was Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario's pixel art in this new game looks almost identical to that of the original Donkey Kong.

But if you look at the game cabinet, it's a different story: Miyamoto completely redesigned Mario, making him MUCH younger; He looks like a character you would find in a 80s shounen comic or manga! Gone is the middle-aged man from the original Donkey Kong. These new designs also stuck around in Miyamoto's next game, Mario Bros., where both Mario and Luigi look, again, quite cartoon-like. Oh, and between those two games, Nintendo of America produced one more poster, which is in the middle of Miyamoto's two different styles. However, in the future, Miyamoto seemed determined to carry this cartoon style forward.

And that's where we hit a major milestone in Mario's design shift: Super Mario Bros. You see, up until this point, a defining characteristic of Mario had been his height... or rather, his lack thereof: he was a small small man jumping from side to side. sewers. But after the success of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, many other companies had created somewhat similar games. Miyamoto thought to himself, "Well, I'm not going to let those other games surpass us!" And so he began working on the definitive Mario game. Until then, Mario had focused exclusively on jumping, so this would be the core of Miyamoto's new game.

He explained: “We started by doing tests to see how the player would feel controlling a large character, twice the size of Mario. Since it seemed very good to us, we continued developing the idea.” And this is where Mario's now iconic look from Super Mario Bros. began. Miyamoto doubled Mario's height and created a more detailed version of the Mario that players had come to know and love. He kept the basic elements that made Mario “Mario” (his overalls, his big nose, his mustache, and his hat), but essentially made him double his height! And when the developers tried to control this big new Mario, they found it really fun.

So fun, in fact, that they considered getting rid of Mario's smaller design entirely! In the end, they decided to keep both, making Mario grow in size after eating a mushroom. And that's how Mario's look changed once again. But that's just pixel art. Because when Super Mario Bros was almost finished, it was time to create an illustration for the game box. According to Miyamoto, “Since we made Donkey Kong, I did a lot of pencil sketches of Mario and then gave them to an outside illustrator to polish. When we released Super Mario Bros., I was thinking about asking a professional manga artist or a well-known illustrator to do the art, but time was running out, so I drew the original packaging art myself.” And so, Miyamoto began sketching the final designs for the game's main characters, including Mario.

And here is the final illustration! It's a big change from the last design Miyamoto designed: this new version of Mario is more detailed, with bright blue eyes, an expressive smile on his face, brown sideburns, and an M on his cap. And that same year, Mario's design took another step forward. And for the first time in Mario history, it wasn't thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto. In 1985, Nintendo hired legendary animator Yoichi Kotabe. Kotabe is really a great animator, as he has worked on animes like Heidi: Girl of the Alps, Sally the Witch, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and many more.

He was friends with Hayao Miyazaki, the Studio Ghibli creator behind Totoro and Spirited Away. And in 1985, he was hired to work at Nintendo to improve some of the art and animations in Nintendo games. One of his first projects was to take Shigeru Miyamoto's designs for the Mario characters and refine them a bit. And of course, the most important design of all was Mario himself. In the words of Yoichi Kotabe, “When I went to draw Mario, the only thing I took into account was the illustration on the package. Then I found out that Miyamoto was the artist, so I asked him all kinds of questions.

Is this face okay? Is he like that? In the end, Kotabe didn't dramatically change Mario, but he made many small changes to the character's characteristics (his size, position, shape) that resulted in this much more polished final design. Miyamoto was really pleased with this illustration, to the point that he used it as the basis for Mario's pixel art in his later appearances. Additionally, Kotabe continued to illustrate Mario for the Mario games that followed. But then, in 1996, Mario's design changed once again. The Nintendo 64 was Nintendo's big leap from 2D to 3D games, and its flagship game was Super Mario 64, the first 3D Super Mario game.

This meant that the developers had a lot to figure out: how do you turn a 2D platformer into something that uses 3 dimensions? Well, for one thing, they now had to create 3D models of their characters and levels, instead of the simpler 2D sprites of before. And for Mario, there was a man in charge of creating this model: Yoshiaki Koizumi. He explained: "I created Mario's motion model and some test textures." He now says that as if it were easy, but actually creating the 3D model of Mario required a huge amount of work. He worked together with Yoichi Kotabe to adapt his design to 3D.

Kotabe even put together a graphic of what his Mario design would look like from different angles. And after a lot of work, this is what Yoshiaki Koizumi came up with! Now, of course, due to the limited resources of the Nintendo 64, Koizumi's Mario model

doesn

't bear much resemblance to Kotabe's designs; For one thing, it's much more lockable. But I think of this Mario as the last great evolution of this character's design. If you look at what Mario looks like on the front of the Mario 64 box, where technological resources weren't as limited, this Mario here looks remarkably similar to Mario images from recent years.

This Mario design is here to stay. So, yes, over the last 25 years, Nintendo might have changed Mario's skin color a little, moved his eyes a little, and even experimented with using more realistic textures... but at its core, the design Mario's has remained remarkably consistent over the past 20 years. years. Even in the upcoming Mario movie, which was animated by a studio on the other side of the world from Nintendo, Mario's design is quite similar to the design of the games. And I think that tells you something: that while Miyamoto and Nintendo may have had to tinker and experiment a bit to come up with their final design, they soon found something great.

Something perfect that needed no adjustments, changes or alterations. This Mario design is extremely iconic and I can't imagine it changing again! Hey, thanks so much for watching until the end! This video was an odyssey to make and edit, but I'm very pleased with the result, so I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. And as always, see you in the next video - bye!