Wahoo! Four cool Super Mario facts on his 40th birthday

Happy birthday Mario!

Saturday 13 September marks 40 years since Super Mario Bros, a video game starring the world famous plumber, was released.

Super Mario Bros came out in Japan on 13 September 1985 on a console called the Famicom, later sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

Since then, he's featured in more than 200 games and even a few films too.

Let's look at some stuff you might not know about Mario - we've got one fact for every decade he's been around!

1. Mario's first appearance wasn't in his own game

See that little character in the bottom left corner? He went on to have a very bright future...

Even though Super Mario Bros officially kicked off the console franchise, the hero had already appeared in the Mario Bros arcade game two years earlier. But even that wasn't his first outing.

Mario was actually first introduced to the world in the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong, as a playable character who has to rescue someone from a giant gorilla.

As the game saw the hero jump up and down, he became known as Jumpman, but his original name in the Donkey Kong game was Mr Video.

In an interview with Nintendo, the game's creator Shigeru Miyamoto said that this was because he wanted to use the same character - Mr Video - in every video game he made.

Which wasn't far off what ended up happening!

2. He's not just a plumber...

Creator Shigeru Miyamoto has had quite a legacy

In Donkey Kong, Mario's role, wandering around a building site, led to him being described as a carpenter.

But when he popped up again in Mario Bros, and given his proper name, Miyamoto decided that he should be a plumber - because a lot of the game was set underground - a job which Mario's now world famous for.

And this isn't the only career that Mario has decided to try...

Over the main series of games and spin-offs, he's been a racing driver, doctor, basketball player, footballer, martial artist, and more!

3. The reason Mario has his famous moustache

Have you ever played any retro games?

The design of Mario, with his moustache, dungarees and hat, has become iconic.

But the decision to give him this look had a far more technical reason to do with how games used to be made.

Digital images, like video games, are made up of thousands of tiny squares that you can't really see called pixels.

But back in the early 1980s, when Mario was created, characters were 16 x 16 pixellated images, meaning that each square took up a lot of the character's body.

It also meant that it was much harder to animate realistic movements of a character's mouth or their hair.

Because of that, Mario was given a moustache so that the designers didn't have to give him a mouth - and they gave him a hat to avoid animating hair!

4. The Super Mario Bros Movie wasn't Mario's first time at the cinema

You might have seen the animated kids' film The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which came out in 2023.

But this wasn't Mario's first time on the big screen - thirty years earlier a live action Super Mario Bros film had been released.

The 1993 movie wasn't well reviewed by critics, and it didn't make enough money through ticket sales to cover the amount that had been spent making it, but it's become a cult favourite since then.