Before the Open World, There Was a Pipe

IGN built a Museum of Mario—a proper HTML5 production, scroll-through architecture, the whole franchise laid out like a retrospective worth attending. This was 2013 and it felt like the internet doing something right for once: treating a video game character with the curatorial seriousness usually reserved for jazz musicians or dead painters.

Mario is 1985 if you’re counting from Super Mario Bros., older if you count Donkey Kong. He’s been a plumber, a doctor, a go-kart racer, a tennis player, a golfer—the most employed character in entertainment history and somehow still recognizable as the same anxious Italian-adjacent jumper who first ran right across a screen. Everything about him should be exhausted by now. It isn’t.

What I kept thinking about, scrolling through the timeline, was how much of my childhood was organized around him without my ever consciously deciding that. Super Mario World was the first game I finished. Yoshi’s Island was the first game that genuinely upset me when it ended. The SNES years had a specific texture—plastic cartridge, that startup jingle, the way afternoons collapsed into evenings without warning. The museum format made all of that feel historical, which was disorienting in the best possible way.

Nintendo has always understood something that other game companies keep relearning: a world works because of its rules, not its graphics. You could draw Mario in crayon and he’d still be Mario. That’s an incredibly rare thing to have designed.