It is quite common for many artistic expressions to owe much of their design to chance. Super Mario, Nintendo‘s iconic saga, is no exception. In fact, the platformer could have been completely different if it were not for one detail: Shigeru Miyamoto decided to add green pipes as a means of transportation after seeing a somewhat shoddy construction in the middle of the street.
As reported by GamesRadar, this detail was revealed in 2009, when the Japanese creative gave an interview to the media outlet Iwata Ask. In this interview, he spoke about several very interesting details. Already at that time they were thinking about how to add a new transport system, but they did not yet know how.
Super Mario’s pipes were born thanks to a drain in the middle of the street
Right off the bat, they had come up with several systems, and among them had appeared the idea of adding pipes. Moreover, he claimed that they were partly inspired by the world of comics and manga. “If you read old comics, there will always be wastelands with pipes lying around,” he said.
However, the team faced a number of problems. For example, although they liked the concept of pipes, they did not know how to prevent enemies from piling up at the bottom. “Having the top and bottom of the screen connected in the same way [as the left and right sides] would have been a bit strange,” he said.
Luckily, he received the spark of inspiration while returning home from a day’s work. “When I was on my way home from the office, I saw a concrete wall in a residential area. Several drainage pipes were coming out of it and I thought ‘I can use them!’ (laughs),” he said. “It’s proven that something that comes out of a pipe will then go back into it,” he ended up telling Iwata, he explained.
It seems that this wall was a bit of a botched job, because seeing a drainpipe in an ordinary residential wall does not seem to be a very fine job. Be that as it may, this is little more than a detail of a story that is undoubtedly quite curious.
The Nintendo classic could have changed many other things
Another interview and statement that GamesRadar retrieved is from Miyamoto himself in the volume of Game Maestro (translated by Shmuplations). As he revealed, things could have been very different.
Originally, the development team considered adding all sorts of enemies. “We came up with the idea of adding flies and crabs,” he said. “I imagine that the environment with those three creatures (turtles, crabs and flies) would have been an underground tunnel,” which would have changed the scenarios a lot.
In fact, he went so far as to say that he imagined the setting could have been a New York subway, for example, since he could imagine somewhere like that. Luckily, in the end it was not this way, and the team decided to design their own fantasy world.