Mario is one of gaming’s most iconic characters, but millions of gamers are probably very wrong about his age. Most people assume that Nintendo’s famous plumber is middle-aged, but according to his creator, legendary Nintendo director Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario is much younger than that. Nintendo recently re-published an old interview from 2005 in which Shigeru Miyamoto discusses the minimalistic approach that the development team took when creating Mario as a character. According to Miyamoto, the only concrete detail they settled on was that he’s about 24 or 25 years old.

“I think it was fortuitous that we didn’t put any restrictions on Mario as a character. Normally when you create a character and present him to the world, all the details get filed in: What’s his favourite colour? What kind of food does he like to eat? Aside from the fact that he’s about 24-25 years old, we didn’t define anything else. When we make a game we take care not to add incongruence to that game’s world. With that caveat, I’d like to keep using Mario in future games.”

— Shigeru Miyamoto

Some trivia-loving fans may know that this is not Nintendo’s first indication that Mario is young. Mario’s trophy in the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Melee states that he is “about 26 years old,” but the English version changes the description to say “His tastes have changed over 20 years of gaming.”

Source: Nintendo (via Arstechnica)

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