Mario Segale, game character inspiration

Mario A. Segale, a Seattle-area real estate developer who unwittingly lent his name to perhaps the most famous video game character in history — Nintendo’s Mario — died at a local hospital on Oct. 27. He was 84.

Starting in the 1950s, Segale built a small empire in construction and real estate in Tukwila, a suburb of Seattle. About 1980 he rented a 60,000-squarefoot warehouse to Nintendo, a Japanese video-game company, as it sought to expand to the U.S. market.

In his book “Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World,” David Sheff wrote that a small company team had gathered in the warehouse one day and was struggling to come up with American names for the characters in the arcade game “Donkey Kong.” They were stuck on the character of a squat carpenter wearing a red cap when there was a knock on the door.

It was Segale, who had come to berate Minoru Arakawa, then the president of Nintendo of America, for being past due on the rent.

Arakawa was already under great pressure to succeed, and Segale “blasted him” in front of everyone, Sheff wrote. A flustered Arakawa vowed that Segale would get his money soon.

When he left, Sheff wrote, the team knew it had its name: “Super Mario!”

Super Mario had only a supporting role in “Donkey Kong,” but by the 1990s he had become Nintendo’s beloved mascot and the star of one of the most popular video game franchises to date. (He also changed professions, from carpentry to plumbing, when he got his own game.)

Mario Arnold Segale was born in Seattle on April 30, 1934, to Louis and Rina Segale.

He started his company, M.A. Segale Inc., with a single dump truck, the obituary says. It became a major construction contractor in the Northwest. Segale also continued his parents’ practice of buying land around Tukwila, and he established a business park there in the early 1970s.

Segale sold the construction company in 1998 to concentrate on Segale Properties, the family’s real estate business. The company also owns commercial properties in Seattle and agricultural land, including a vineyard, in eastern Washington.

His obituary noted that he had “always ducked the notoriety and wanted to be known instead for what he accomplished in his life.”

The Seattle Times asked Segale in 1993 what he thought about his name being used in a game that was so hugely popular.

“You might say I’m still waiting for my royalty checks,” he said.