His face was designed around a shortage of pixels
MARIO first appeared in 1981 as a nameless character called Jumpman, and almost everything about his look came from the limits of the hardware. A cap, because hair was impossible to animate in a figure sixteen pixels tall. A moustache, because a mouth would not show up against his face. Bright dungarees over a coloured shirt, so his arms were visible against his body when he moved.
He was a carpenter in that first game. The PLUMBER came two years later in Mario Bros., where the action took place in the sewers of New York — and the name came from Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo's American warehouse, who is said to have turned up to chase an overdue rent payment while the staff were arguing about what to call him.
The first thirty seconds teach you the game
The opening of Super Mario Bros., released in 1985, is studied by game designers as a masterclass in teaching without words. You start alone on an empty screen, so the only thing to do is move right. A GOOMBA walks towards you, and the only escape is to JUMP. A question block sits where you will hit it by accident, and what pops out is a MUSHROOM that bounces back towards you, so that the power-up catches the nervous player who tries to avoid it.
By the time you meet the first PIPE, you have learned to run, jump, hit blocks and collect things — without a single instruction on screen. That entire lesson takes about thirty seconds, and the game never mentions that it is teaching you anything.
The most-used character in games
MARIO has starred in hundreds of games, far more than any other character, and hardly any of them are the same sort of game. He has appeared in platformers, a go-KART racer, tennis, golf, football, party games, puzzle games, a painting game and several role-playing adventures.
The supporting cast has grown around him: his brother LUIGI, PRINCESS PEACH of the Mushroom KINGDOM, the dinosaur YOSHI, the loyal TOAD, the ghostly BOO, the shelled KOOPA and BOWSER, who has been kidnapping and losing the same princess for forty years without ever reconsidering his strategy.
Finishing in under five minutes
Some players have taken the original game apart completely. Using warp PIPEs, frame-perfect jumps and a technique for clipping through the edges of walls, speedrunners now finish all of Super Mario Bros. in under five minutes — a game most children of the 1980s never finished at all.
They know exactly where every COIN, STAR and FIREBALL flower sits, and the run is timed to hundredths of a second. The record has been beaten by margins as small as a single frame of animation, which is one sixtieth of a second, and there is an argument that it is now close to the limit of what is humanly possible.