The Eight-Bit Phenomenon: The Success Story of the Mario Media Franchise

40 years ago, the Japanese corporation Nintendo released Mario Bros. about the adventures of a plumber in the sewers of New York. Thus was launched the most successful gaming franchise in history. The game brought in over $45 billion, and comics, films and other media products gave about $10 billion more. How Mario went beyond the gaming industry – in the material “Kommersant”.

From carpenter to plumber

For the first time, a mustachioed character in a red and blue overalls appeared in 1981 in the Donkey Kong arcade game (“Stubborn Gorilla”). The prototype Mario began his career as a carpenter named Jumpman (“Jumper”), saving the girl Paulina from a giant monkey. He could run, jump and swing a sledgehammer.

Initially, artist Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make Popeye the Sailor, a popular character in American comics, the main character of the arcade. He was supposed to help Nintendo conquer the US market. However, the Japanese failed to get the go-ahead to use his image.

Then Miyamoto came up with a carpenter in bright overalls that stood out well against a dark background. The cap on his head saved the developers from having to animate the character’s hair, and the mustache covered his motionless mouth.

Jumper got its Italian roots thanks to businessman Mario Segal, from whom the American division of Nintendo rented a warehouse in Seattle. When the company stopped paying its bills before the arcade’s release, Sehgal paid its president, Minor Arakawa, an angry visit. The expression of the Italian impressed the Japanese so much that they jokingly began to call the main character Mario.

“Officially” the Jumper changed his name already in the sequel – the game Donkey Kong Jr., where the characters switched places (there the son of a giant gorilla saves his father from captivity). This is the only series in the franchise to feature Mario as an antagonist.

He finally got a job as a plumber in the first solo game, Mario Bros., which was released in 1983 after the success of Donkey Kong. According to its plot, Mario, along with his brother Luigi, descend into the sewers of New York to fight turtles, crabs, flies and icicles. And although this arcade game was also a great success, the series received real recognition after the release of Super Mario Bros. in 1985.

It was in it that the Mario universe acquired its usual features: classic opponents, secret levels and the main idea – saving Princess Peach from the evil Bowser, who is a mixture of a turtle and a dragon. The action takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom, exploring which a plumber can find a Super Mushroom that increases it in size. Hence the prefix “super” in the name, which has become an integral part of the franchise. Side scrolling appeared in the game for the first time, but there was no place for Luigi – he acts as a character for the second player.

Money from a pipe

In the first four months after release, 3 million Super Mario Bros. cartridges were sold in Japan alone. worth more than ¥12.2 billion (about $196 million at the current exchange rate), and by 1994 more than 40 million copies ($1.6 billion) had been sold worldwide. Then the game got into the Guinness Book of Records as the best-selling game in history and held this leadership for more than 20 years.

Polls conducted in the early 1990s among American children showed that they recognize Mario more often than Mickey Mouse. In 2021, the original Super Mario Bros. went under the hammer at the Rally auction for an industry-record $2 million.

The success prompted Nintendo to create many sequels: the original series of adventures of the mustachioed plumber has more than two dozen games. In 1996, the first 3D game in the Super Mario 64 universe was released, which revolutionized the platform genre and also became one of the most commercially successful for Nintendo. In it, in addition to everything else, Mario spoke for the first time.

In addition to plumbing, he tried himself in other areas, such as medicine. His alter ego Dr. Mario stars in the spin-off series and even appears as a standalone character in the Super Smash Bros. games. Mario has competed in a wide variety of sports including golf, tennis, basketball, hockey, football, as well as karting and motocross.

Over 250 games based on the universe have been created, which together have sold over 830 million copies. The most successful of them so far is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which was bought 8.45 million times last year alone, and sold 53.8 million copies in total.

By the way, in 2014, Nintendo allowed the use of the image of Mario in an advertisement for Mercedes, which included a 30-second video featuring an eight-bit GLA and a “real” plumber. In addition, a Mercedes-Benz GLA level was added to Mario Kart 8 as a free add-on, followed by two new models, the W25 Silver Arrow and the 300 SL Roadster.

Got a mustache

Along with recognition, Mario also faced criticism. The franchise has not escaped the industry-standard accusations of inciting aggression (allegedly the plumber too often solves problems with violence and sets a bad example) and provoking addiction. However, no convincing evidence for this has been found.

There were other complaints, for example because of gender stereotypes. Allegedly, Peach symbolizes female weakness and vulnerability, because she is inactive in anticipation of a male savior. In response, Nintendo released Super Princess Peach in 2005, in which the princess herself rescues Mario.

Failure and hit rental

On television, Mario made his debut in 1983 in several episodes of the American cartoon show Saturday Supercade, appearing as a circus trainer rescuing Paulina from the clutches of a gorilla. And already in 1989 he had his own TV show, where live shooting was combined with animation. It aired in the US and Canada.

At the turn of the 1990s, the story of the Italian plumber quickly replenished with adaptations. For example, five television series by the animation studio DIC Entertainment and numerous comics have been released.

In 1993, the fantastic comedy Super Mario Bros. starring Bob Hoskins was released. The picture was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the first film adaptation of a video game in history, although its plot did not intersect with the platformer. Nintendo gave the creators a free hand and got a dark action movie in which Mario and Luigi try to prevent a dictator from a parallel universe from taking over the Earth with the help of lizard people.

Despite a number of innovative techniques and the worldwide popularity of Mario himself, the tape failed at the box office. With a budget of $48 million, box office receipts were less than $40 million.

This failure kept Nintendo away from film adaptations for a long time. Only 30 years later, the animated feature Super Mario Bros Movies was released, which brought the creators $146.4 million on its first weekend. .2 million in other markets) on a budget of $48 million. It became the second highest-grossing animated film in history (behind only Frozen 2) and the most commercially successful video game adaptation.

This time, the Japanese did not let things take their course and took an active part in the creation of the film. Shigeru Miyamoto acted as one of its producers, and the corporation itself shared the funding with Universal Pictures. According to Japanese analysts, Nintendo could earn about $200 million, although the exact terms of the deal with Illumination Entertainment were not disclosed.

Fellow bricks

In 2020, on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. The Lego Group, in collaboration with Nintendo, has released a board game of the same name. It includes an interactive plumber figure with a display, speaker and scanner, as well as classic game board elements (green water pipes, flagpoles, blocks and opponents) made from standard Danish bricks.

The goal of the game is similar to the computer one – to defeat Bowser, but you only need to do it live. Using the scanner, Mario recognizes the player’s actions and transmits them via Bluetooth to the phone, where the points are calculated.

Lego Super Mario has over 70 different building sets that you can combine to create your own playfields. The basic set – with a Mario figure – could be purchased for $60 at the start of sales.

A collaboration with Nintendo has helped the Danish toy maker achieve record-breaking financial results in recent years. Lego Group’s revenue in 2020 grew by 13% to 43.7 billion Danish kroner ($6.9 billion), while operating profit grew by 19% at once, to 12.9 billion Danish kroner ($2 billion).

Private and public

In 2016, it turned out that Mario was still quite young: Nintendo published on its official website a forgotten ten-year-old interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, in which he admitted that the character was only “24-25 years old.” This was a real discovery for fans. And the name of the plumber is completely consonant with his name, that is, his name is Mario Mario. This was told in 2012 by dubbing actor Charles Martinet, whose voices are spoken by the hero of the video game. Three years later, this was confirmed by Miyamoto.

Since 1985, the character has been under copyright protection, which expires only in 2080. However, this does not interfere with the manifestation of people’s love for Mario around the world. For example, in 2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in the guise of a plumber, took over the Olympic relay at the closing of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2020, Russian biologists Alexander Novikov and Dayana Sharafutdinova named a species of copepods (maraenobiotus supermario) living in the delta of the Siberian Lena River after Mario. Like the video game plumber, these arthropods have funny antennae and often go underground.

Videos on YouTube, one way or another related to Mario, as of April this year, have already been viewed more than 100 billion times.

Anastasia Vinnitskaya