Gallery: Super Mario through the ages
He’s 25 years old today, but though he’s got a lot more pixels than he started off with, he is still true to his old retro looks.
Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, The Super Mario Bros series is the best-selling video game series of all time, with more than 240 million units sold globally. Apparently the character was originally called Jumpman but because of its resemblance to the caretaker in the New York office where the game was designed the programmers named their character after him – Mario Segali.
According to the same source, more-nintendo, Mario wears a hat because at the time it was really difficult to animate hairs in motion. And those dungarees? Well having differently coloured arms and legs made it easier to animate images of him walking.
A quick picture gallery of how the little mustachioed game hero has evolved through his quarter century:
