Super Mario Quiz
Mario has had more jobs than almost any character in games, from doctor to referee.
A Super Mario quiz with answers about how the games were made as well as who appears in them: clever shortcuts, a famous opening level, the composer behind the tune and the origin of a rival's name.
Did you know?
- The original game contains a famous accident. By passing through a wall in an early underground level, players can reach a 'Minus World', an endless underwater stage that was never meant to exist. It appears because the game reads a piece of data it was not supposed to read.
- The Goomba, the small brown enemy that is usually the first thing players meet, was the last character added to the 1985 game. Almost no memory was left, so it was animated with just two pictures, and its 'squashed' look is simply one of them flattened.
- For about three decades Mario's cheerful voice belonged to the American actor Charles Martinet. He won the part in the early 1990s after arriving at the audition as everyone was packing up, and performed the role until 2023, when he became an ambassador for the character.
How Mario became the face of video games
Mario was born out of a problem. In 1981 Nintendo's American branch was left with thousands of unsold arcade cabinets from a game that had failed. A young artist at the company, Shigeru Miyamoto, was asked to design a new game that could be fitted into them. The result introduced a small jumping hero, and the cabinets sold out. The hero was not even the title character: the game was named after the ape he fought.
The game that set the rules
'Super Mario Bros.' arrived in 1985 and sold about forty million copies. It scrolled smoothly from left to right through a long, colourful world at a time when most games took place on a single screen. Running, jumping on enemies, hidden rooms, power-ups and a flag at the end of each level became the basic grammar of a whole type of game, the platformer, that designers still follow.
Reinventing the hero
Each new console brought a different Mario. One game added a map to choose routes, another a dinosaur to ride, another three-dimensional worlds to explore. The character also moved into other kinds of games: go-kart racing from 1992, tennis, golf, puzzles and party games. Designers at the company have said they start from a new way of playing and only afterwards decide which characters fit it. The result is a character who has appeared in more than two hundred games.
Beyond the console
A live-action film in 1993 was a famous failure, and for thirty years the company kept its hero away from cinemas. An animated film in 2023 took well over a billion dollars at the box office. Theme-park areas built around the games have opened in Japan and the United States, where visitors can punch blocks and collect coins with a wristband. Few fictional characters are recognised by so many people in so many countries.