No spoilers here.
So don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie…
But I was just watching an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super Mario Brothers) at the Variety Magazine’s office shortly after the launch of the Super Mario movie.
And he was talking about:
His first Mario memory!
The reason Mario was designed the way he is now — back in the day, video game consoles could only support very limited pixels.
Basically…
Mario had to fit in a 16 x 16 pixel square.
Which was tough work. So he came up with some artistic shortcuts.
Like…
… giving Mario a beard and big nose so he didn’t have to draw the mouth…
… giving Mario a hat, so he didn’t have to draw the hair…
… making the character as distinctive and memorable as possible…