By some measures, Mario—the chubby mustachioed hero of Nintendo’s best-selling series of video games—is the world’s most recognizable fictional icon. Far fewer people, however, know how it is that a Japanese company previously best known for manufacturing playing cards created this beloved personage in 1981, and decided to make him a New York–based Italian plumber.
The 1981 video game that introduced Mario to the world was called Donkey Kong, itself the result of an unlikely naming process whose history varies depending on who you ask. The game saw players controlling a small, jumping man who was attempting to climb up a hazardous building site in order to rescue a woman from an irate giant ape: the “kong” of the title, thanks to Japanese slang derived from the title of the film King Kong. The “donkey” half, according to game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, was simply intended to invoke stupidity or goofiness—although some still claim that it was actually a miscommunication of the word monkey.131
In any case, when the game appeared it was not its giant malicious monkey who would command the most attention, but its diminutive leaping hero, whom players had to guide through multiple screens of increasingly challenging obstacles—a then revolutionary development in the design of video games. The player-character was nicknamed “jump man,” thanks to his ability to jump over the obstacles tossed at him, and Miyamoto initially planned to make his official title “Mr. Video.”
According to gaming legend, it was subsequently decided to give the character a more personable name based on his resemblance to Nintendo’s warehouse landlord in America, one Mario Segale. The story has never been officially confirmed, either by Nintendo or Segale. The name, however, has proved a triumph—together with Mario’s unlikely status as an Italian-American plumber, a role only created for him as part of his second video-game outing, 1983’s “Mario Brothers,” in order to fit in with his onscreen habit of running through giant pipes.132
Alongside Mario, perhaps the greatest early icon of arcade gaming is a still more mysterious character, Pac-man—if yellow circles with mouths can actually be called characters. First released in 1980 by another Japanese firm, Namco, playing the game means maneuvering your yellow hero around a maze, gobbling up dots while avoiding evil ghosts.
Thanks to this consumption-centered task and the game’s crude sound effects, the character was initially named “pakku-man,” after the Japanese phrase paku-paku taberu, describing the sound of someone repeatedly opening and closing their mouth. Upon its release in Japan, this name was simplified to “Puck Man.” And there it might have remained, had the game not been bought for distribution in America, leading Namco to recognize that having puck in its title might prove too great a temptation for teenagers who spotted what happened when the initial p was replaced with a slightly different letter.133