Super Mario

There has never been a time in my life without Mario. Even before I controlled the portly plumber in my first Mario game, Super Mario 64, I was aware of his existence. I watched a Super Mario cartoon as a child. I saw his moustached face smiling out at me from various video game boxes on visits to Toys R Us. I even had a Mario-themed plastic lunchbox for school.

During my early teenage years, Mario was synonymous with Nintendo. Mario was Nintendo. The only two franchises that could reasonably compete with him for supremacy, as far as I was concerned, were Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda – and they were still comfortably in second and third place, respectively.

But, of course, there was a time before Mario – even for Nintendo. In fact, for most of Nintendo’s history, Mario didn’t exist. The company was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889 and opened as a Kyoto card shop manufacturing colourful handmade flower cards called hanafuda. The shop was named Nintendo Koppai. ‘Koppai’ can be translated as ‘cards’, but the word ‘Nintendo’ is harder to pin down. It is commonly assumed to mean ‘leave luck to heaven’ or ‘We do what we can,’ which suggests the chance inherent in card games – and this is indeed what many sources I consulted during the research for this article claimed. But, digging a little deeper, I found that this explanation has very little historical validation. There are various other theories about the origin of the name (some of which can be read here), but it’s worth noting that Fusajiro’s great-grandson, Hiroshi, has admitted that even he does not know the true meaning of the company’s name.

Over the next century, while continuing to sell cards (which it still does today), Nintendo experimented with everything from taxicabs to love hotels, before returning to its origins selling games and toys. In 1977, Nintendo released its first video game system, the Color TV-Game (in Japan only). A few years later, in 1980, Nintendo of America (NoA) was founded, which began importing its parent company’s arcade cabinets from Japan. NoA’s president, Minoru Arakawa (son-in-law of Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi), boldly ordered 3,000 copies of the arcade space shooter Radar Scope. Unfortunately, the much-hyped game tanked in America, leaving a warehouse full of 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines. A young staff artist named Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with creating a replacement to plug into the now-useless arcade cabinets – one that would better engage with American gamers. This new game needed to be a big hit. Anything less would probably be the nail in NoA’s coffin.

Miyamoto had never developed a game in his life, but what he lacked in experience, he more than made up for in creativity. Originally, Miyamoto wanted the new game to be based on Popeye, a classic cartoon that centres around the titular character frequently saving his love, Olive Oyl, from his brutish archrival, Bluto. Nintendo already had permission to use Popeye characters in some capacity, since it had been selling Popeye playing cards for many years and was already developing a Popeye Game & Watch unit. But, for some reason or other, Nintendo was denied a licence to make an arcade game based on Popeye characters¹. It had already been decided early on that Popeye would appear at the bottom of the screen and his nemesis, Bluto, would be at the top, thus establishing the framework for the game. Since Nintendo couldn’t get the rights to the characters after all, it decided to keep the contents of the game as it was and just change the characters. The spinach-eating sailor could easily be reimagined slightly as a generic ‘middle-aged man with a strong sense of justice’, as Miyamoto would later say. Olive Oyl would be just another damsel in distress (she was originally just called ‘Lady’). And boulder-sized Bluto could be someone else, too. Perhaps a big, angry, dumb gorilla?

Everyone knows about Donkey Kong these days, of course, but where did the name for this huge, enraged simian actually come from? ‘Kong’ is easily explained, since Miyamoto was inspired by the 1933 film King Kong, and ‘Kong’ was already a common Japanese slang term for ‘gorilla’. As for ‘Donkey’… well, it is sometimes said that the full name was originally ‘Monkey Kong’, but was misspelt or misinterpreted due to a bad phone connection or a garbled fax. However, this is little more than an urban myth. Miyamoto has stated that he wanted a name that would convey the thought of a ‘stupid ape’ to an American audience. It is said that Miyamoto wanted the English word for ‘stubborn’, since a stubborn gorilla was at the heart of the game he envisioned. And what animal is more stubborn than a donkey? So, a game about an ape was named after a domesticated pack animal².

Miyamoto now had both a name and a villain in Donkey Kong. In the game, he’s a towering, imposing figure who stands at the top of each screen and throws barrels towards the brave hero trying to save his girl. That hero, of course, is Mario – but he wasn’t called Mario back then. He was originally called Ossan (Japanese for ‘Middle-Aged Man’) before becoming, more famously, Jumpman (chosen for its similarity to the popular brands Walkman and Pac-Man). As his name suggested, Jumpman jumped. In fact, he was a phenomenal leaper, capable of jumping his full body height from a standing position – and he would need those skills to get over the countless barrels that Donkey Kong kept throwing down at him. Surprisingly, the game nearly didn’t have any jumping in it at all. Miyamoto originally intended the game to be more of a maze, controlled exclusively with a joystick – but when he learned that the arcade cabinet had an extra button, he began experimenting with ways to incorporate this additional input method into the game design. He imagined how someone would instinctively act if they saw a barrel rolling towards them, and so Mario took his very first leap.

When the time came to ship Donkey Kong to North America, it was decided that some of the names should be changed during the localisation process. Minoru Arakawa of NoA lost a fight to rename both Donkey Kong the game and Donkey Kong the character, but he was allowed to rename Jumpman and Lady. The warehouse where the Radar Scope arcade cabinets were being stored (and collecting dust) was run by a man called Don James, whose wife was named Polly. As a way of thanking the warehouse manager, who received a lot of heat from the landlord over Nintendo’s uncollected rent, they decided to rename ‘Lady’ after his wife. And so Lady became Pauline, close enough to Polly.

Jumpman was also renamed. Even back then, Nintendo intended to turn Mario into a mascot-type character by having him appear in many of Miyamoto’s subsequent video games. With this idea in mind, the first new name that Nintendo considered for Jumpman was ‘Mr Video’. It was a name clearly derived from Nintendo’s first-ever gaming mascot, Mr Game & Watch. But, in one of the video game industry’s most bizarre anecdotes, that name would change once again before the game shipped. The warehouse that NoA was renting was owned by an Italian construction tycoon named Mario Segale. One day, or so the tale goes, Segale showed up at the warehouse in person to angrily remind Arakawa about the rent. He grew so incensed that, according to one version of the story (there have been several told over the years), he practically jumped up and down. After the landlord left and the eviction threat was delivered, someone suggested the name Mario because, apparently, he looked similar to Jumpman (insofar as a real human being can look like a rudimentary video game character from the early 80s, I suppose). At the very least, Segale had a moustache, just like Jumpman. So, Jumpman was nicknamed Mario, and the name stuck.

Mario’s iconic look came about due to limitations of the hardware back in 1981. The original Mario sprite was only 16 x 16 pixels, which meant every dot had to count. His entire design is a case of form being dictated by function. In order to emphasise the unique characteristics of the very small character on the screen, he was given a big nose and a moustache. Placing a hat on his head meant that the game designers could reduce the space it took to represent his hair down to just two lines – and it also meant they didn’t need to try and solve the problems of animating it³. The team also found it challenging to create a convincing running animation for Mario, since they had only three animation frames to work with. They eventually hit upon a winning formula, but for it to work and make his movement easier to see, Mario’s arms needed to be a different colour from his body. Thus, Mario was given the iconic overalls that have become a constant throughout the Mario series. And since overalls were often worn by people in construction jobs, Mario gained an occupation. He became a carpenter. His plumbing years were still to come.

Although very basic by today’s standards, Donkey Kong was arguably the most complex game of its time. Pre-Donkey Kong, video games were largely stationary. Spots of light flashed and moved around on the screen, but the screen itself remained still. Early arcade games, such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, were single-screen experiences. But when Donkey Kong arrived, it became one of the very first games ever to feature multiple screens – four in total, each one representing 25 metres of a construction site’s height⁴.

The first screen of diagonal steel girders and rolling barrels remains one of the most iconic images in gaming history – one that is etched into many people’s minds. But that screen is only one-quarter of the game. Whenever you reach what appears to be the top of the screen and are about to rescue your girlfriend, Donkey Kong carries her away again, further up the construction site, necessitating a screen change. Stage Two introduces conveyor belts with tubs of cement on them (which, due to the rudimentary graphics, are often mistaken for pies). Stage Three involves rising elevator platforms and a hopping spring. Eventually, Donkey Kong can go no higher, and the final stage has you removing rivets to dismantle the structure on which DK stands, sending the gorilla crashing to the ground (only for him to recover so the whole sequence can start again, this time harder than before).

This blog may be called Nostalgic Worlds, but, for me at least, there is no nostalgia associated with Donkey Kong. That’s because I wasn’t born when the arcade version first came out (in fact, my parents hadn’t even met in 1981), and I only played it quite recently, on the Nintendo Switch, as part of its Arcade Archives collection. It may be simple, but it is surprisingly addictive. It is also, as I discovered, fiendishly difficult at times. The increasing number of barrels that the titular ape throws at Mario soon begins to fill up the screen, and it’s all too easy to get taken out by a stray barrel or fireball. Mistimed jumps will often spell doom.

The reason I wanted to write about Donkey Kong is because, from a historical point of view, it’s an incredibly important video game, for several reasons. Firstly, when Donkey Kong introduced the need to jump over approaching enemies and between gaps of space in the hope of getting to the next area safely, it wasn’t just a new and fun idea; it essentially created an entirely new genre of game. Donkey Kong was defined by the actions of Jumpman/Mario leaping around, and so the ‘platforming game’, which became immensely popular throughout the 80s and 90s, was established. Not that such terminology had been coined at the time of Donkey Kong’s release; the U.S. gaming press at the time referred to it as a ‘climbing game’.

Secondly, Donkey Kong is considered the earliest video game with a storyline that visually unfolds from beginning to end on-screen: the ape kidnaps a girl, the hero chases the ape, the ape falls, and the hero and the girl are reunited. It also marked the first time a video game’s storyline preceded its programming, rather than being appended as an afterthought.

Thirdly, Donkey Kong is the game that helped change Nintendo’s fortunes in the video game industry. After the failure of Radar Scope in America, Shigeru Miyamoto delivered an unexpected blockbuster. Released on 9 July 1981, Donkey Kong was a massive commercial success, pulling Nintendo out of financial trouble. The initial 2,000 Donkey Kong arcade games – built in converted Radar Scope units – sold out quickly, forcing Japan to quickly start producing more. By October of that year, Donkey Kong was selling 4,000 units a month. The red-and-black upright cabinets became a fixture not only in arcades but in taverns and smoky bars across the country. At one point, there were 60,000 Donkey Kong machines in use worldwide simultaneously.

And finally, Donkey Kong was the first game to feature Mario. He wasn’t quite the Mario that we know and love today, but even before being given a title role, he proved influential. Soon, Mario would get his own fully developed franchise and become one of the world’s most beloved characters. I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again, many times, on Nostalgic Worlds.

---

1. After the success of Donkey Kong, Nintendo acquired the license to the Popeye characters for arcade machines. In late 1982, Nintendo released an arcade game based on its characters, simply titled Popeye. ↩︎
2. Miyamoto liked the idea of naming a video game after the bad guy, in a similar vein to Space Invaders. ↩︎
3. Miyamoto has also claimed that Mario wears a cap because he, himself, cannot draw hair. ↩︎
4. In fact, Miyamoto wanted the game to go even further and actually scroll upwards, but technical limitations prevented that, so he settled on four connected screens instead. ↩︎