Here’s a fun one we came across recently. Great Big Story put together an awesome 6-minute video on how the famous video game character Mario got his mustache – and his name.
As it turns out, the artist behind the 8-bit classics Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., Shigeru Miyamoto, basically had to draw Mario that way. In order to distinguish the nose from the rest of the face, he added in the mustache (remember, the paper-to-digital design back in the ’80s wasn’t as intuitive as it is now). With that, “Mr. Video” was born.
The character became Mario after Nintendo shipped Donkey Kong to the U.S. market. The landlord of the Seattle warehouse where the games were held happened to have a mustache. His name was Mario Segale.