Franchise: Mario

According to Eiji Anouma, Miyamoto got the idea of naming Mario from Marionette. Marionette is a puppet controlled from above with strings or wires. Miyamoto also made puppets during his days at school where he would display his puppets in front of the class.

In the Mario Kart games, Rosalina is a heavy/large class character. However, in the Super Smash Bros. series she is a light class character. The reason she is a heavy class character in Mario Kart is most likely due to her height.

After the launch of Mario Strikers Charged, Next Level Games had pitched to Nintendo a Mario volleyball game titled Super Mario Spikers. Referred to during development as simply Mario Volleyball, it was to be a mix of volleyball and wrestling mechanics, and was presented with hints of a TV game show. It was intended for the Wii and work began on it around the end of 2006. Development was canceled in 2007 after the pitch had failed with Nintendo. The game was financed as a reward from the studio's previous work on the Strikers games, and the volleyball mechanic was thought to have been reused for Mario Sports Mix.

Mario has starred in over 200 different games.

According to a 1993 Nintendo Character Guide, Yoshi's full name is T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas.

Princess Daisy's country of origin, Sarasaland, takes its name from the calico textiles imported by Portuguese traders from India to Japan during the Edo Period. Calico became widely popular in Japan to the point the Portuguese word for it, sarasa, was adapted into the Japanese language.

Calico (or sarasa) textiles are most commonly flower patterns made up of multiple, contrasting colors. This is why it is ruled by Daisy, a flower-inspired princess. And just as animal color patterns are named after the fabric (i.e., calico cats, calico goldfish, etc.) it's name alludes to the fact it is comprised of multiple, diverse kingdoms. The reason it is written as "Sarasaland," is because of the poor localization for the English release of Super Mario Land. In Japanese, it is: サラサ・ランド. Properly translated to English, it would be: Calico Land. A space or hyphen can be used in place of the interpoint.

Subsequent descriptions have rendered the name differently, as well:
•The ''Official Game Boy Players Guide'' omits the word land completely: "Sarasa"
•The Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins manual spaces the name out, but still leaves calico untranslated: "Sarasa Land"
•The Daisy trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee hyphenates the name and leaves the 'L' in "Land" lowercase: "Sarasa-land"
•Daisy's Mario Superstar Baseball profile misspells sarasa with "ra" added on the end: "Sarasara Land"

Nintendo has depicted Mario (previously Jumpman) with hair and no hat since the NES and Famicom. But in the early artwork for Donkey Kong, Mario was bald.

Ever since Mario's debut in 1981, there hasn't been a single year that a Mario game hasn't been released.

Before he became the voice of Mario, Charles Martinet was a Shakespearean actor. He even based his Mario voice on the character of Gremio from The Taming of the Shrew.

Koji Kondo, the composer of various Mario games, tries to make music that people can repeatedly listen to without getting sick of. He would listen to his own music for hours to see if he would get sick of it or not.

A street in Spain, in the suburb of Zargoza, was named "Avenida de Super Mario Bros." as a tribute to the Mario series. The name was chosen via an online poll for the newly built neighbourhood with plans to name more streets after other video game series.

The 'P' in "P-Wing" stands for Paratroopa or Patapata (Japanese name for Paratroopa).

All 8-bit sprite tiles have only three colors plus transparency as a fourth color, but Bowser's original sprite from Super Mario Bros. appears to have four colors as well as transparency as a color. This is because the black background is what gives Bowser his black spiked collars around his wrists. Due to this, using cheat codes so Bowser appears in a non-castle level will look like his hands are separated from his arms. This occurs again in Super Mario Bros. 3 where Bowser's sprite is designed to exploit the black background and use it as an outline element.

Charles Martinet (the voice for Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi from 1990 to 2023) was actually not invited to the auditions to be the new voice of Mario. He crashed the auditions and was just asked to do an Italian accent until he ran out of things to say. He knew nothing about Mario going into the audition, and since he was told that he was going to talk to children throughout the game, he started to do a more playful and gentle voice instead of the traditional gruff Italian accent that Mario had before. Martinet left so much of an impression at the recording that his tape was the only one sent to Nintendo.

Luigi's name comes from a pun on the Japanese word ルイージ¸ or ruiji meaning "similar". Since all of his sprites in earlier games were just recolors of his brother's sprites, and his name was Italian like Mario's was, it seemed to fit him.

Bowser's Japanese name, Kuppa (pronounced Koopa), was named by Shigeru Miyamoto after the Korean dish Gukbap, roughly known in Japan as 'Kuppa'. Other dishes considered were Yukke ('Yukhoe' in Korean) and Bibinba ('Bibimbap' in Korean).

Mario's hair is brown, while his mustache is black. This was because around the time of Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario's creators wanted him to have a definite hair color in game, while it was easier to draw his mustache by extending the black outline of his nose.

According to Nintendo via a Nintendo Direct "Year of Luigi" announcement, Mario and Luigi are twins. It's also been stated that Luigi is the youngest.

A tech demo developed by Shigeru Miyamoto over a number of years titled "Mario 128" was shown off at Nintendo's Spaceworld 2000 trade show and was designed to showcase the GameCube's ability to utilize multiple AIs. The demo featured 128 Marios dismantling a pseudo-8 bit Mario sprite composed of several blocks by picking up and carrying them away. This project had a tumultuous development cycle with little to no details coming out over the years until 2007 when he revealed at a GDC Keynote that some parts of the project were utilized in two games he produced in the 2000s. The general concept and some other parts of Mario 128 were developed into Pikmin after Miyamoto asked his team to create an entirely new game that would be nothing like a sequel to a Mario game. As for the second game, the ability to warp the terrain seen in the tech demo as well as "different sizes of spherical items" influenced the free-form gravity and ability to walk around entire planets in Super Mario Galaxy.

Super Mario Bros. 3 marked a permanent shift in the color scheme of Mario's overalls and sweater. Between the box arts and sprites of previous games, Mario would often switch from wearing a blue sweater and red overalls, to wearing a red sweater and blue overalls. The latter outfit would become the unified standard appearance for Mario in all subsequent games starting with Super Mario Bros. 3.