Nintendo’s Super Mario Turns 30

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Nintendo Co.’s Super Mario Brothers on Sunday celebrated its 30th anniversary since its release, after having sold more than 40 million copies and becoming one of the most successful video games of all time.

The party came just ahead of Nintendo’s announcement Monday that former banker Tatsumi Kimishima would take the helm of the video-game maker.

The first mention of Mario in The Wall Street Journal came in June 1983, when Mario had yet to become a household name and was a character in the company’s Donkey Kong series. “Atari Inc. said it has been granted an exclusive license by Nintendo Co. of Japan to manufacture and distribute home video and computer games based on Nintendo’s Mario Brothers coin-operated video game,” the article said.

Involved in the development of Super Mario Brothers were two future executives of the company: Shigeru Miyamoto and the late Satoru Iwata. In an article published on the company’s website in 2010, Mr. Iwata said that the challenge to create the game using up as little memory as possible was “fun.” Mr. Miyamoto, the game developer-turned executive, said he depended on Mr. Iwata to somehow make the game work.

The game was released in Japan on Sept. 13, 1985, and soon became a global hit. The franchise is continually updated whenever Nintendo brings out new hardware, from Game Boy to the Wii U.

“The folks who got your kids addicted to Super Mario Brothers are out to do it again with a miniaturized Nintendo that intends to be the star of the Christmas season,” WSJ’s Stephen Kreider Yoder wrote in October 1989, before the release of Game Boy.

“Mario will be fighting to rescue Princess Daisy from the clutches of space monster Tatanga. And toy stores will be fighting to keep the gadgets on their shelves,” he wrote.


Mario with game creator Shigeru Miyamoto, second from right, Takashi Tezuka, second from left and Nintendo game music composer Koji Kondo, right. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Regarding Mario the character, Mr. Miyamoto has said that it helped launch his career as a game designer at a time when such profession didn’t exist and games were typically made by programmers. The character’s future depends on combining Mario games with the latest technology, Mr. Miyamoto has said.

“It is difficult to explain how startling this game was in 1985. For the first time, the world of a video game was a delightful place to savor in its own right, rewarding patient and obsessive exploration,” author James Kennedy wrote in the WSJ in August 2011.