Mario Segale
Name behind Nintendo’s Super Mario video games character
MARIO SEGALE, who has died aged 84, was a Seattle businessman who gave his name, somewhat unwillingly, to Mario, the plumber star of more than 200 video games.
Mario, a chubby, mustachioed Italian with big brown boots, a red cap and blue overalls, was the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto, a video-games designer hired by the Japanese firm Nintendo to help them break into America’s $8billion arcadegame market.
In 1980 he helped the company develop Radar Scope, a Space Invaders knock-off which, while successful in Japan, flopped in the US, leaving the company with a large number of unsold units and facing financial collapse.
Tasked with rectifying the situation, Miyamoto’s first idea was to give Radar Scope a makeover by licensing Popeye the sailor man to be its main character. But the licensing deal fell through, so Miyamoto had to invent a new character – and plot – from scratch.
He came up with the bizarre Donkey Kong – part Disney, part Japanese manga comic – in which a pint-size working-class everyman character, a carpenter with the uninspiring name of Jumpman, had to climb through a building site while being bombarded by barrels thrown by a giant gorilla and fireballs caused by exploding oil barrels. His goal was to rescue a damsel in distress being held captive by the gorilla.
Nintendo’s US subsidiary was operating out of a rented warehouse owned by Segale in the suburbs of Seattle. One day in 1981, when Miyamoto’s team was trying to think up better names for their protagonist, Segale stormed into the meeting to deliver a dressing-down over unpaid rent, only departing after securing promises of payment.
The Nintendo employees then returned to their task. With Segale’s cameo at the front of their minds, the choice of name became obvious.
Donkey Kong was a colossal hit. Nintendo had sold just 1,000 Radar Scope arcade cabinets in America; in its first two years Donkey Kong sold more than 60,000. Sequels followed, Mario became a plumber and also gained a colourful twin brother, Luigi, supposedly named after a pizza parlour near the warehouse.
Super Mario, as the franchise became known, entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful gaming franchise of all time.
Mario Arnold Segale was born on April 30 1934 in Seattle to Italian immigrant farmers who had bought land a few miles south of the city. After leaving school in 1952, he started his own construction company and over the years, with his wife Donna, turned the business into a leading contractor in Washington state.
He also moved into property development, acquiring land and establishing an industrial estate in Tukwila, just north of Seattle, where he rented out the warehouse to Nintendo. In 1998 he sold his construction company to focus on property development.
Segale did not bear much of a physical resemblance to his arcade-game character and was reportedly worried that the Mario link might make it hard for him to be taken seriously as a businessman. He never profited financially from the franchise, telling the Seattle Times in 1993 that “You might say I’m still waiting for my royalty cheques.”
“He always ducked the notoriety and wanted to be known instead for what he accomplished in his life,” observed an obituary published by his funeral directors.
Segale is survived by his wife Donna, whom he married in 1957, and by their three daughters and a son.
Mario Segale, born April 30 1934, died October 27 2018