Super Mario Saved Gaming

Move over, yellow ghost-chomping pizza pie with a missing slice! Out of my way, you midget princess-saving robin hood. No other video game character can get me as excited in button-mashing anticipation as Super Mario.

The year was 1981, the star was Donkey Kong, and the hero was a plumber named "Jumpman" -- precisely because he had to jump around to save his girlfriend from the evil clutches of a King Kong clone. Before Donkey Kong could be ported to the US versions, Nintendo US employees -- who were probably on the brink of being evicted from their office, were brainstorming over Westernized character names. When in storms their paunchy moustached landlord, Mario Segal, demanding their overdue rent. Hence little Jumpman was christened Mario.

By 1983, Mario and his brother Luigi will be transported to the sewers of New York City. The first Mario Bros. game shows this duo eliminating pests in an underground maze of pipes. Hence, they had to make the career shift from carpentry to plumbing.

In the same year that Mario was introduced to the gaming market, the video game console scene was crashing. Personal home computers were abound, and shoppers were simply shunning consoles like the Atari 2600. When Nintendo introduced NES (or the Family Computer to us), as well as the jumping adventurous Toadstool-saving plumber hero, gamers reverted back in a clamour to bring home this console. So thanks to Super Mario, video gaming was saved.