“Without Mario, my life would be completely different”: collector of objects related to the mascot of the Japanese giant of the video game Nintendo, Kikai celebrates his 40th anniversary this year, like the first adventure of the mustachuing hero on console.
Released in Japan on September 13, 1985, “Super Mario Bros.” revolutionized this industry, being one of the first titles to develop its character horizontally in a colorful universe.
“My father had bought the game and I have been playing there for as long as I remember,” Kikai, a Japanese who lives near Tokyo, told AFP and gathered in his office “20 to 30,000 objects” linked to Mario.
Figurines, stuffed animals, carpets … At this collector, the plumber’s round and jovial face is everywhere.
Like him, several generations of players have taken a passion for this character created by the Japanese Shigeru Miyamoto and appeared for the first time in 1981 under the name of “Jumpman” in the arcade game “Donkey Kong”.
He officially became Mario in 1983 with the arcade terminal “Mario Bros.” Then reached celebrity thanks to “Super Mario Bros.”, worldwide success released on the Famicom (NES in Europe) console in Nintendo and sold more than 40 million copies.
Happy accident
“It is a happy accident because at the start, this character is not at all intended to become an icon of the video game”, underlines Alexis Bross, co-author of the book “Generations Mario”.
Blue overalls to better distinguish it, red cap to avoid having to animate his hair … At the start, the character created is “purely functional, with very strong technical constraints”, since Mario is then composed of a few pixels on a screen.
This initial aesthetic has been inspiring for more than 15 years a street artist in Lyon, in France, whose mosaics mixing the hero of Nintendo with the magician Gandalf or Dark Vador are flourishing in cities around the world.
“To find elements of my game console in the street is to bring things that are intangible. I found it pretty crazy, ”tells AFP the man who calls himself in the woup, 39, a mask by Mario screwed on her face to preserve her anonymity.
“Mario Kart”, “Mario Golf”, “Mario Tennis”: the character has known many adventures and variations, with his brother Luigi and his enemy Bowser, even embodying the transition from 2D to the 3D of the video game at the time of the release of the Nintendo 64 in 1996.
Gradually, he will establish himself as a “transgenerational” and “reassuring” figure, says Alexis Bross. “He is an average man, very close to us, who has no power at the origin and is a little frozen in time.”
Multi-casquette
Faced with the successes of the moment like “Fortnite” or “Roblox”, particularly popular games among young players, Mario benefits from the “nostalgia for parents”, who continue to buy and play with their children, explains Rhys Elliott, analyst in Alinea.
Aware of this situation, Nintendo has just launched a range of clothes and accessories in Japan for toddlers.
This wave of derivative products ranges from backpacks to luxury watches, including Lego. Mario is even available in amusement parks in Japan and the United States.
In the cinema, “Super Mario Bros, the film”, released in 2023, was one of the most important success in recent years and reported more than $ 1.3 billion. A suite is planned for 2026.
But at 40 spent, finished playing the hero delivering the princess in her castle in exchange for a kiss.
Faced with the emancipation of Nintendo female characters, now heroines of their own titles, Mario “adapts to new audiences and follows the movements of society a little,” observes Alexis Bross.
Pending a new 3D opus from the plumber’s adventures -the last dating back to 2017 with “Super Mario Odyssey” -, he hopes to see germinate “an absolutely new idea that would pose a new milestone in the history of video games”.
