Tag Archives: retro gaming facts

A Colorful Beginning Long before the blue suited hero cemented his place in gaming history, Capcom’s designers toyed with a name that could have changed everything, Rainbow Man. It was not some throwaway title scribbled in a notebook. The choice reflected what made the character unique. Each time he defeated a Robot Master he absorbed their power and his armor blazed with a new color. According to the character’s development …

Mario’s Mustache Was a Hardware Trick Mario’s iconic mustache wasn’t added for style — it was added because the technology of the time demanded it. When Shigeru Miyamoto designed Mario for Donkey Kong in 1981, he was limited to a tiny 16×16 sprite on arcade hardware. There simply weren’t enough pixels to draw a clear mouth and nose. The solution? A bold mustache that visually separated the nose from the …

Most fans can’t picture Mario without Yoshi, the cheerful green dino who first carried him across Dinosaur Land. But earlier in development, the “rideable friend” Nintendo wanted for Mario wasn’t a dinosaur at all. According to an interview packaged with the SNES Classic, the team originally imagined a horse that Mario could mount and use to sprint through stages—an idea later echoed in reporting by IGN. You read that right: …

When Super Mario Bros. 2 launched in North America in 1988, it introduced players to a whole new roster of characters. Among them was a pink dinosaur-like enemy named Birdo, who quickly stood out as one of the strangest and most memorable figures in the Mario universe. But Birdo’s legacy goes far beyond just being a quirky boss. In the original instruction manual, Nintendo described Birdo as a male who …