Mario at 40: How Nintendo turned a middle-aged plumber into the world’s greatest design strategy
It’s-a-me! Sean Atkins
I’ll admit it straight away: I’m biased. In a past life, I edited TOTAL!, a Nintendo magazine that meant living and breathing warp pipes, Koopa shells, and late-night cartathons. One memory still sits close to the top of my games journalist career highlights: being the first person from the UK, outside of Nintendo, to play Super Mario 64. Or so they told me.
It felt like stepping into the future. The way Mario somersaulted, the way Lakitu’s floating camera tracked your every move – it was a masterclass in how 3D could feel alive. To this day, Mazza 64’s great grandchild, Super Mario Odyssey remains my favourite game of all time, because it carries that same DNA: joy disguised as design, whimsy hiding decades of obsessive craft.
Mario shouldn’t have worked. A stout Italian plumber in kids TV overalls, jumping on turtle shells, chasing a perpetually imperilled princess? On paper, it reads more like a surrealist skit than the blueprint for a multi-billion-dollar franchise. And yet, forty years since Super Mario Bros. launched in arcades and on the NES, he’s not only endured but evolved into a pop-cultural constant.
Nintendo’s mascot has outsold Madden, outlasted Master Chief, and even out-meme’d Sonic. Why? Because Nintendo understood what many brands and creative industries forget: delight is a design choice, and longevity is a craft, not an accident.
From plumber to pop icon: the power of ‘crossover creativity’
Advertising veteran Dave Trott describes creativity as the collision of two unrelated things producing a third. Mario embodies this perfectly. Industrial designer Shigeru Miyamoto mashed together his childhood wanderings in Japanese forests with the limited pixels of 8-bit tech, and out popped a playground in cartridge form. Mushroom kingdoms, warp pipes, cloud levels – all recombinations of everyday childhood experiences into interactive wonder.
Where most competitors leaned into war fantasies or digital bloodsport, Nintendo doubled down on whimsy. Mario isn’t power fantasy, he’s play fantasy.
Craft-first design: discipline disguised as fun
Legendary choreographer and author Twyla Tharp calls the blank studio her “white room” – the disciplined space where craft habits birth creativity. Nintendo works the same way. What looks effortless – a plumber’s jump, a coin block’s ping – is the result of decades of obsessive iteration.
As Michael Highland, creative director at Buck Games, puts it: “The elegant simplicity players experience is the result of institutional knowledge, iteration, and painstaking craftsmanship.”
Mario’s brilliance is in UX before UX was jargon:
Super Mario 64 smuggled 3D camera tutorials into Lakitu’s floating camcorder.
Mario Kart 8 justified its replay mechanic by turning it into an in-game TV channel.
Super Mario Maker gave fans the design toolkit Nintendo had been refining in secret for years.
These are not gimmicks. They’re Nintendo’s answer to behavioral economist Rory Sutherland’s “psycho-logic” – solving human problems (confusion, onboarding, delight) with irrational-seeming, yet magically effective design.
Luck, but engineered
Andy Nairn – co-founder of Lucky Generals and author of Go Luck Yourself – argues brands need to recognise and “stack the odds of luck.” Mario is proof. Was it luck that his creator happened to love caves and forests? Was it luck that the NES hit America just as arcades were fading? Yes. But Nintendo turned those serendipities into a system: a philosophy that gameplay should feel intuitive whether you’re six or sixty.
Where other studios chase realism, Nintendo keeps chasing fun. They repeat the formula, but with radical tweaks: galaxies instead of castles, hats that possess enemies instead of fire flowers, psychedelic “Wonder Seeds” that warp a level mid-run. Each iteration feels both familiar and brand new — the sweet spot author Allen Gannett calls the creative curve.
Cultural strategy: Mario as myth
Cultural theorist Douglas Holt, author of How Brands Become Icons, describes iconic brands as those that tap into cultural tensions. Mario does this in reverse: he transcends cultural specificity by being everyone’s everyman. No one cosplays as Halo’s Master Chief outside a convention, but Mario merch shows up everywhere – from a McDonald’s Happy Meal to a runway collab.
Mario is flexible myth. He can star in Got Milk ads, front Domino’s Pizza campaigns, or headline a billion-dollar movie. Like Nike’s swoosh or Disney’s Mickey, Mario isn’t just IP – he’s cultural shorthand for play.
Nostalgia as UX
Game scholar Jennifer deWinter, author of a biography of Shigeru Miyamoto, argues Mario’s design always circles back to childhood wonder. From side-scrolling playgrounds to Odyssey’s tourism-brochure kingdoms, Mario is nostalgia engineered as gameplay.
When Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023) introduced levels that bent reality with surreal joy, Nintendo wasn’t just updating mechanics; it was doubling down on the irrational magic that Rory Sutherland insists brands need to preserve.
What brands can learn from Mario
Mario’s 40-year run offers a masterclass for anyone trying to build relevance in an attention-fractured culture:
Delight beats logic. A portly plumber outselling Hollywood superheroes proves the irrational often wins. What shouldn’t work often does – if it makes people smile.
Craft is invisible but indispensable. Decades of iteration make “simple fun” feel natural, never dated. The lesson: the best user experiences hide the effort.
Flex your myth. Mario is a character, a design language, and a cultural icon – able to move from console to cereal box without losing identity. That kind of flexible consistency is brand alchemy.
Play with nostalgia. Like fashion cycles, aesthetics loop. Mario’s latest design is bouncier, rounder, deliberately retro – perfectly tuned to indie-inspired nostalgia culture. Remixing the past is often more powerful than chasing the future.
World-building wins. From Odyssey’s travel brochures to Mario 3’s stage curtains, Nintendo builds universes that feel alive. Brands that build worlds, not just campaigns, create places people want to return to.
Stay weird. Mario Paint’s cat meow music tool seemed trivial at the time – but it seeded Super Mario Maker decades later. Nintendo embraces eccentricity because experiments often grow into icons. Brands that play it too safe rarely make history.
Nintendo never let Mario become just a mascot. He’s a testing ground, a cultural mirror, a playground made of pixels. Forty years in, he’s proof that creative strategy doesn’t always mean chasing the new. Sometimes it means perfecting the joy of jumping on a turtle shell.
And that’s a lesson every brand should tape above their desk: the simplest design, delivered with care, can last forever.
Happy 40th birthday Mario!
