Random Mario Character

Who is in this list

Not just the famous ones. The whole population, including the ones who appeared in a single role-playing game twenty years ago and were never seen again.

A few of them:

• Mario
• Luigi
• Pauline
• Toadsworth
• Rosalina
• Vivian
• Grubba
• Beldam

The first name on that list is the most recognisable fictional character on the planet, and almost every visible thing about him exists because of a hardware limitation in 1981. Not one of his defining features was a creative decision. They were all solutions to problems.

Drawing a character

1. Press Generate for one name.
2. Ask for four if you want a party, a kart lineup, or an argument about who would win.
3. Type into Contains to search the names.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these names come from

Characters gathered and checked by hand from across four decades of games, main series and spin-offs alike. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Every part of Mario is a workaround

He began as somebody else. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make a game about Popeye, and Nintendo could not get the licence. So the sailor became a nameless workman, the brute Bluto became a gorilla, and Olive Oyl became a woman at the top of a construction site. The game was Donkey Kong, and the workman had no name at all. In Japanese he was Ossan, which means roughly middle-aged bloke. In the English instructions he was Jumpman.

He had to be drawn in a sprite of about sixteen pixels square. Work through what that costs you, one feature at a time.

The overalls. Give a character a shirt of one colour and when his arms swing you cannot see them move, because arm and torso are the same colour. So put him in dungarees with a contrasting shirt. Now the arms read.

The moustache. There is no room for a mouth. A mouth at that size is one pixel, and one pixel does not read as a mouth. But a dark shape under the nose does read as a face. So he gets a moustache, and now you know which way he is looking.

The nose. Large, because a small nose disappears. Look at the woman at the top of the level in that first game: her nose is a single pixel and you would never notice she has one.

The hat. Hair is very hard to draw at that size and much harder to animate. When he jumps, what does his fringe do? Put a cap on him and the question goes away forever.

The build. Short and wide, so that he fills the box he has been allocated and stays legible against a busy background.

Every one of those is an engineering answer. Put them together and you have the most recognisable silhouette in popular culture, arrived at by a man trying to make a person out of not enough pixels.

He is Italian because of the moustache

This is the part that should be taught in every design school, and Miyamoto has said it plainly.

The moustache came first, and it came from the pixel budget. Then, looking at the finished character, the team observed that he had a moustache, and concluded from that alone that he must be Italian.

Read that again in order. The nationality of the most famous character in games was deduced, after the fact, from a rendering constraint. Nobody sat down and decided to make an Italian plumber. They made a shape that would read on a monitor, then reverse-engineered a person out of it.

He was not even a plumber. In the first game he is a carpenter, on a building site. He became a plumber later, when the setting was sewers, because as Miyamoto put it, the scenario dictates the role. The job followed the level design. The nationality followed the moustache. The moustache followed the resolution.

The lesson is not that constraints are a nuisance you overcome. It is that constraints do the deciding, and then you find out afterwards who you have made.

The landlord, and a story that keeps changing

Miyamoto had originally wanted to call the character Mr. Video, imagining him popping up in every game he made the way Alfred Hitchcock walked through his own films. He has since said that under that name the character would have vanished from the face of the earth, and he is almost certainly right.

The story everybody tells is this. Nintendo's American arm rented a warehouse. The landlord, a man named Mario Segale, turned up demanding overdue rent and had a loud argument with the company president. Afterwards, somebody at Nintendo of America thought it would be funny to name the little jumping man after him. A telex went to Japan. The name stuck, and Segale, a private man who mostly declined to discuss it for the rest of his life, became the most quietly famous landlord in history.

Now the honest part. That story is told by people who were in the room, and it is probably true. But Miyamoto himself has, at various times, told a different version, in which the character was named after an Italian caretaker at a New York hotel where Nintendo staff stayed, and named before the company was paying Segale anything at all. He has also, in later years, appeared to confirm the Segale account.

Both cannot be right. Nobody has settled it, and the people who could are mostly gone. It is a small thing, but it is a useful reminder that even the founding myths of an eight hundred million selling franchise are, thirty years on, a matter of whose memory you trust.

Why the cast never stops growing

Look again at the length of that list, and at how many of those names you do not recognise.

Mario was designed to be a character with no fixed personality and no fixed job. Miyamoto has compared the approach to the old comic strips, where the same cast turns up as businessmen in one strip and pirates in the next, and nobody minds. That is why Mario can be a plumber, a doctor, a referee, a go-kart driver and a tennis player without anybody feeling that a rule has been broken.

An empty character is infinitely reusable. But an empty character also cannot carry a story, so whenever the games have wanted a story, they have had to invent somebody who can. That is where the strange half of this list comes from: the villains, the sidekicks, the tragic ones, the ones with actual interior lives, all of them created because the man in the middle deliberately has none.

He is a hole in the shape of a person, and everybody else exists to give the hole something to do.

Questions people ask

Are Jumpman and Mario the same character?

Yes. He was unnamed in Japan, called Jumpman in the English instructions, and renamed for the American release. The name reached Japan later, by which point he was also, briefly, a villain in his own sequel.

Where did the white gloves come from?

Not from the game. They were added by an illustrator drawing the promotional flyer for the American release, and they stayed, because they solve the same problem the overalls solve: they make the hands visible.

Why is Luigi green?

Because the arcade hardware could give a second player a recoloured copy of the first player's sprite very cheaply, and green was available. His entire visual identity started as a palette swap.

Why are there characters here I have never heard of?

Because the role-playing games invented dozens of them, gave several of them more personality than Mario has ever had, and then quietly retired them. They are some of the most interesting writing the franchise has produced, and most people have never met them.

References

1. Mario, on the Popeye licence, the graphical limitations behind the design, and the naming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario
2. Super Mario Wiki, on the sprite constraints behind the overalls, moustache, nose and cap, and on the gloves being a later illustrator's addition. https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario
3. Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, Mario 101, on the competing accounts of how Mario got his name and Miyamoto's remark about the moustache and the nationality. https://www.thrillingtalesofoldvideogames.com/blog/mario-101-history