Keza Macdonald at Lit Hub:
In Donkey Kong, Jumpman was a carpenter with a hammer. But now, what with all the pipes, in the endearingly literal narrative logic of early video games, it made sense for Mario to be a plumber. “There were several reasons why we used pipes,” Miyamoto told me in a 2020 interview. “They were perfect for the mechanic in Mario Bros., where enemies disappearing at the bottom of the screen would appear again from the top after a short time; they had this comic book feel about them where they’d bulge and have something come out of them; and then there was the fact that I would always see them on my way to work.” (On his route to the office, Miyamoto would walk through a residential area that had some construction work going on, revealing drainage pipes sticking out of the walls.)
Mario’s unorthodox plumbing uniform of overalls and a red cap has a more functional explanation. In the minuscule eight-by-eight-pixel palette afforded him in the early 1980s, Miyamoto wanted to find a way to draw a character more appealing than the stickmen and blobs that early games typically used as the player’s avatar (characters surely devised by a programmer, not an artist, as Miyamoto asserted—just a little dismissively—in a 2009 conversation with Satoru Iwata).
more here.
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