Short-fused property tycoon became inspiration for Nintendo’s Super Mario
The property king of Tukwila, Washington, had rented out a warehouse to an ambitious Japanese video-game company that was eager to break into the American market. One day in 1981, not for the first time in his life, Mario Segale was irate. Nintendo was late with the rent, so he thundered into the building in the Seattle suburbs, interrupted a meeting and gave Minoru Arakawa, the president of the firm’s struggling American subsidiary, a tongue-lashing.
According to lore, Arakawa apologised, promised to pay up, and the Italian-American landlord went on his way. The Nintendo employees then returned to their task: thinking up names that would appeal to Americans for characters in an arcade game starring a giant gorilla, Donkey Kong.
What to call the pint-sized, well-fed, carpenter? Before Segale’s dramatic entrance, the character’s working title was the prosaic Jumpman. After his cameo, the choice became obvious.
Donkey Kong was a success and Mario (later depicted as a plumber) was given his own series of games, as well as a colourful twin brother, Luigi, supposedly named after a pizza parlour near the warehouse. Mario has since appeared in more than 200 games, selling hundreds of millions of copies.
Making the rent is no longer a problem. This year Nintendo announced an annual profit of US$1.6 billion.
The Donkey Kong designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, confirmed in 2015 that Segale, who has died aged 84, was the inspiration for the name Mario. Still, Segale, who is not sporting a Mario-style moustache in the few public photographs of him, had no interest in mining the tale for personal fame. Nor did he appear to benefit financially from the franchise, although he was hardly strapped for cash in any case.
‘‘You might say I’m still waiting for my royalty cheques,’’ he told the Seattle Times in 1993. That year Super Mario Bros, a notorious flop featuring Bob Hoskins as Mario, was inflicted on filmgoers, and a book by David Sheff, Game Over, drew attention to Mario’s origins.
However, Segale and his family shunned attention and avoided media interviews. ‘‘He always ducked the notoriety and wanted to be known instead for what he accomplished in his life,’’ said an obituary published by the family’s funeral home.
Mario Arnold Segale was born in 1934 in Seattle, Washington, to Italian immigrant farmers, Louis and Rina, who bought land a few miles south of the city. He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Donna, and his four children, who all entered the family business: Lisa, Mark, Tina and Nita.
After graduating from high school in 1952, he started his own construction company with a single truck. With his wife he turned the business into a leading regional contractor that paved runways and mined gravel. He would often sketch out plans and ideas on the back of napkins and placemats.
Following in his parents’ footsteps, he acquired land and established an industrial estate, selling the construction company to an Irish firm in 1998 for $60 million so he could focus on property development.
He later sold land to a Native American tribe for $74m and also owned a vineyard in the state. It was reported that the family owned thousands of acres of land, donated significant sums to the state Democratic Party and that Segale harboured ambitions to create a commercial and research estate in Tukwila to rival the scale of the nearby Microsoft campus.
Away from work he enjoyed hunting, fishing, cigars and eating Italian food – provided that cheese was not among the ingredients.
A 2010 article for the website Technologizer quoted an anonymous associate of Segale describing him as a private, ‘‘semi-grumpy old man’’ with a close-knit family who worried that the Super Mario link might have a negative impact on his business, perhaps because the connection with the cartoonish creation would make it hard to take him seriously.
‘‘He doesn’t even wear [overalls],’’ another source said in the story, ‘‘but he is not too tall and he does wear suspenders.’’ – The Times
Mario Segale businessman b April 30, 1934 d October 27, 2018
‘‘You might say I’m still waiting for my royalty cheques.’’ Mario Segale in 1993