40 years of Mario games that have grown up with fans

The colour­ful Super Mario Bros, released for Nin­ten­do’s home con­soles in Japan on Sep 13, 1985, was a land­mark of ear­ly video gam­ing

Sur­round­ed by thou­sands of objects bear­ing the like­ness of Nin­ten­do’s mous­ta­chioed plumber, 40-year-old Kikai reflects that his “life would be total­ly dif­fer­ent with­out Mario” who also marks four decades this week.

The colour­ful Super Mario Bros, released for Nin­ten­do’s home con­soles in Japan on Sep 13, 1985, was a land­mark of ear­ly video gam­ing.

Play­ers con­trolled the epony­mous char­ac­ter as he ran and hopped his way from left to right through a colour­ful world of plat­forms, pipes and scowl­ing ene­mies – all set to the jaun­ty eight-bit music that has stuck in minds for decades.

“My father bought me the game, and I’ve been play­ing for as long as I can remem­ber,” Kikai in his office lined with some­where between 20 and 30 thou­sand Mario-relat­ed objects, from plas­tic fig­urines to plush toys and car­pets.

Cre­at­ed by leg­endary game design­er Shigeru Miyamo­to, Mario has obsessed sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of fans like Kikai.

The char­ac­ter’s first appear­ance came in 1981 arcade game Don­key Kong, when he was known sim­ply as Jump­man.

Mar­i­o’s chris­ten­ing came in 1983 with the Mario Bros arcade cab­i­net, but his true rise to fame was with Super Mario Bros on Nin­ten­do’s Fam­i­com con­sole (known as the NES in Europe), which has sold more than 40 mil­lion copies.

LUCKY ACCIDENT

“It was a lucky acci­dent, because at the start there was no plan for this char­ac­ter to become a video gam­ing icon,” said Alex­is Bross, the French co-author of the book Mario Gen­er­a­tions.

The plumber’s look was ini­tial­ly cho­sen to con­serve scarce com­put­ing resources and make him stand out on screen, with bright blue over­alls and a cap that saved on ani­mat­ing hair.

Miyamo­to cre­at­ed Mario as “a com­plete­ly func­tion­al char­ac­ter under very strict tech­ni­cal con­straints” gov­ern­ing the few pix­els mak­ing up his image, Bross not­ed.

But as the games endured through the years, their star became a “gen­er­a­tion-span­ning” and even “reas­sur­ing” pres­ence, he added.

“He’s a reg­u­lar man, not unlike us, who has no spe­cial pow­ers at the out­set and stays a bit frozen in time.”

Beyond Mar­i­o’s main­line adven­tures, spin­off games have dropped him, his bud­dies like broth­er Lui­gi and his rivals like drag­on Bows­er into Mario Golf, Mario Ten­nis and the vast­ly pop­u­lar Mario Kart.

Graph­ics have evolved from 2D to 3D as the games’ reach has spread to many hun­dreds of mil­lions of play­ers world­wide.

But the orig­i­nal pix­e­lat­ed look has long inspired artists mak­ing their own riffs on the char­ac­ter.

The street artist In The Woup puts a Mario-inspired mosa­ic on a wall, in Lyon on August 27, 2025

Lyon-based street artist In The Woup, who declined to give his real name, has been mash­ing Mario up with oth­er char­ac­ters like Gan­dalf from The Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars antag­o­nist Darth Vad­er in gueril­la mosaics dot­ting cities around the world for years.