How did Mario, the character, evolve from Jumpman to Mario?
Miyamoto: Well, the first thing I should probably explain is that when I originally created the Jumpman character my goal was to be able to use a character in a lot of videogames going forward. This stems from something that we often see in Japan, where comic book artists will create their own character and use that character in a lot of different comics. So I was hoping that Mario, or Jumpman, would be kind of a “Mr. Video” type of character who would appear in lots of different games. When we released Donkey Kong, the character was originally just called Jumpman, but what we found out was that the people had started to call him Mario. And the reason for that was that the character design apparently resembled the landlord of the warehouse that Nintendo of America was using and his name happened to be Mario. So when I heard that the people in the United States were calling my character Mario, I thought, “Oh, you know, that’s a catchy name. That’s a good name. I think maybe we could use
