| MARIO
PROJECT #442 "Thank you, Mario! But our Princess is in another castle!" Preamble: Due to the limitations of the medium, a lot of the early eight-bit Nintendo characters were fairly abstract in appearance. (It's one thing to come up with control art of what the designers wanted the characters to look like, but it's quite another thing altogether for those characters to make the translation into video game sprites. They often lost a lot in the translation.) Mario is an interesting example of a character who has evolved considerably over time. His appearance and costume was largely dictated by the limited color pallet available on the NES—features like his overalls and hat and moustache helped make his body parts distinguishable from each other. As technology continued to improve, Mario's appearance began to stabilize, changing less and less between each new game—and we're at a point now where his evolution is unlikely to make any more significant leaps. Mario is always depicted now as wearing blue overalls and a red shirt, but it wasn't always that way. This project is my tribute to his appearance from the original Super Mario Bros. game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, featuring an iconic yet sadly neglected iteration of the character. Wendy's restaurants did a Super Mario promotion back in 2002, and while most of the kids meal toys were junk, they also did a poseable Mario action figure of surprisingly good quality. I ended up with several of them because I knew they would make ideal projects whenever I got around to it. Construction: Mario's video game sprite only had three colors—red, brown, and a sort of orangey color that was used for both his skin and the buttons on his overalls. (I've trained my eyes to see the buttons as yellow or something because that's what I expect to see, but they really are flesh-colored. Same with the emblem on his cap, which unfortunately isn't visible in the mid-jump sprite shown here.) While I followed his original color mapping pretty much exactly as he appears in the game, I did cheat slightly and painted the whites of his eyes and his pupils a more normal color. To my knowledge, Mario has never appeared in this color scheme in any of Nintendo's official packaging artwork, which is one of the reasons this project appealed to me. It's just so deliciously wrong. Comments: Mario did actually wear a more traditional red-and-blue outfit in Donkey Kong, which technically preceded Super Mario Bros., but this fact does in no way make his game sprite from 1985 any less oldskool. |
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This Page Created 11/11/2009
Last Update: 6/25/2010
©2010 Inspiration Studios
Super Mario Bros. and all related characters and elements
are the property of Nintendo of America.
Swing your arms from side to side.
Come on, it's time to go.
