A newly unsurfaced and translated interview reveals more information about how the Mario franchise’s iconic pipes came to be, and there is a pretty simple explanation for it.
Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto told Game Maestro in 2000, and translated more recently by Shmuplations, that although the first Mario Bros. game established Mario as a plumber, the idea for pipes didn’t come until later. Miyamoto said he was walking down the street in Kyoto one day and “saw a plastic pipe sticking out of a wall.” This helped Miyamoto solve a design challenge, and thus the iconic warp pipe was born.
“Due to the way the screens worked, enemies that went to the bottom had to re-appear at the top of the screen. So that got us thinking, OK, we need a path or some way for them to get back up there. Then one day I happened to be walking through the streets of Kyoto, and I saw a plastic pipe sticking out of a wall,” he said (via GamesRadar).
Miyamoto also discussed how a logical setting for the original Mario games was an underground tunnel, in part because it’s where turtles, crabs, and flies–enemies in the game–tend to live. He envisioned a place like New York with its extensive underground tunnel system, though Miyamoto hadn’t ever been to New York at the time.
“I guess we should say Mario Bros. takes place in a New York-ish kind of place, really,” he said.
This wasn’t the last time Miyamoto discussed the origins of Mario’s iconic pipes. In 2009, he said in an Iwata Asks interview that he was walking through a residential area on the way home from his office when he said an area that had “a number of drainage pipes coming out of it.”
“I thought: ‘I can use those!’ (laughs) It’s well established that something will emerge from a pipe and then go back into it,” he said.
But why make the pipes green? Miyamoto said he couldn’t recall the exact reason, but explained that video games at the time couldn’t support all that many different colors.
“Blue was very bright and beautiful. Green was also very nice when you used two different tones. Those were the things we considered when designing the look of the game,” he said.
Nintendo doesn’t have any new Mario games that have been announced, but that could change soon, as Nintendo is likely to bring a new Mario game to the Switch 2. The console will be announced in the next few months, at which point some games should be revealed for it.