Tag Archives: retro gaming facts

An Innocent Gesture with a Dark Twist For more than two decades, fans of Super Mario World believed Mario was simply pointing forward when Yoshi stuck out his tongue. It looked playful and harmless. Mario gave the signal, Yoshi obeyed, and the duo worked together as partners. That illusion shattered in 2017, when Nintendo veteran Shigefumi Hino, the designer who created Yoshi, revealed that the original concept was very different. …

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 …