Mario Bros.

Though it is not clear where videogames were born, maybe somewhere on a shore in the Pacific Ocean, it is a fact that these two plumbers, Mario and Luigi, helped so much to boost Nintendo's power as an entertainment company and also helped to spread the videogame culture around the world and to stablish videogaming as a contemporary (XX and XXI centuries) art.

Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, Mario Bros., were created by Shigeru Miyamoto, considered one of the most important game and story developers of the history of videogames (he's also created Zelda, Donkey Kong and some more hits). Mario's first appearance in a videogame was in 1982, when the plumber was introduced to the Donkey Kong Saga (and by that time Mario was called 'Jumpman'. It would be a bit later when Nintendo changed its name to Mario). It was a big success, so two years later was the star of a videogame that lent his own name: Mario Bros., and where Luigi was introduced as well. And it was in 1985 when Nintendo decided to create the game Super Mario Bros. and was released for the Famicom in Japan and the NES in North America and Europe.

This game, apart from having the Mario Brothers aboard, made its own revolution in the videogames industry, and introduced some gaming innovations like the ultra extensive and multi stage world The Mushroom Kingdom, scenario were Mario and Luigi adventures took place, and also introduced lots of different characters, tricks, shortcuts and a mushroom world seen from the plumber point of view. It became one of those games in which you have to spend more than four hours to get to the end, and that's why the game is closer to nowadays games and though it's a classic platform game, it still has great fun hidden beneath (even though there's a bit of a change when you play Grand Theft Auto San Andreas... if you finish it in less than 6 months please give me a call and tell me how).

But Nintendo and Miyamoto, who quickly realized the potential of the two plumbers and the magic mushroom mythology, didn't wait so much to release a Mario version for almost every computer machine that was able to sum 2+2, either in Nintendo's own machines or arcade machines and eventually, as we've said, anything that was carrying a chip inside. Up to this date, as you can find out on the internet, there are more than 100 Mario Bros. games that have been developed and many of them are still crushing videogame selling lists around the world.

So, in these years we've had the honor of living with Mario, we've seen him driving Karts, fighting against Donkey Kong, playing tennis, playing golf, appearing in his own cartoon show for the TV, in comics, doing some plumber job in his own movie, and of course, in t-shirts, caps, fake moustaches, bags, shopping-mall parties and so on. Because Mario has been one of the first entire videogame characters to reach the nowadays culture, challenging all those other characters whose original appearance was on the tv, novels, comics, or movies. In an ironic way, we could even say that Mario and Luigi were the starting point of a digital pipeline plumbering entertainment era.

But, along with the two main characters, there's the mythology, and this mythology, for the two brothers, include lots of other characters like Yoshi (the green dinosaur), Toad (the mushroom), the Koopas, Princess Peach, and a long list of villains that in different situations Mario has fought. And though among all the videogames, comics, movie and tv series there are lots of different stories and sub-stories, which are not going to be referred here, the main storyline sets that Mario and Luigi, two plumbers that work in Brooklyn, get into the different worlds by entering them through pipe-warps.

There is another main legend which says that the two brothers are children of a Mushroom couple, though through the pass of the years the first version is getting more strenght when we're talking about Mario Bros. past, which is certainly obscure, and will last obscure because neither Miyamoto nor Nintendo are revealing by now clear facts about the birth and education of the bestest plumbers in the world: the Mario Bros.

Links mentioned in People

Shigeru Miyamoto

Mentioned links in works

Grand Theft Auto

Photos

Latest pictures about Mario Bros.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie poster - April, 09; 2023