Why do Mario and Luigi Live in New York? Explaining the Origins of the Super Mario Bros.

Let’s take a little leap into the past! We are in June 1993 and Super Mario fans are discovering the live adaptation of the famous video game.

At the start of the story, Mario and Luigi, played by Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, live in New York, in the Brooklyn district. They try somehow to launch their plumbing business, mistreated by the firm of a certain Scapelli.

Subsequently, while trying to rescue Daisy, captured by King Koopa’s henchmen, the plumber brothers find themselves in the sewers. They eventually step through an interdimensional portal leading them to the Mushroom Kingdom.

Why New York? If the writers included the American city in the plot, it was in reference to the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros.

Shigeru Miyamoto, father of the mustachioed plumber, had sent his two mascots, Mario and Luigi, there to rid the city’s sewers of strange creatures.

If the designer chose New York as his playground, it was for his “labyrinthine underground network of sewage pipes.” For Miyamoto, the Big Apple was therefore the best setting to stage these plumbers going in and out of pipes.

The 1993 Super Mario Bros team therefore took up this idea to characterize our favorite plumbers and give them an origin story. 30 years later, Matthew Fogel, screenwriter of the animated film released on April 5, used exactly the same idea as the authors of the decried work of 1993!

Indeed, at the start of the film, Mario and Luigi also live in Brooklyn and are looking to start their little plumbing company. After a few adventures, they end up traversing the sewers of New York and sneaking into a pipe leading them to the Mushroom Kingdom.

Three decades later, Nintendo has therefore warded off fate by again using New York as the city housing the brothers in overalls. A wink that fans of the famous 1993 nanar will not fail to welcome.

In a way, even if it makes sense that the American city is that of Mario and Luigi compared to the game of 1983, one would have thought that Nintendo refuses to locate the beginning of the adventures of the heroes in New York.

It would have been understandable if Big N preferred to avoid the slightest allusion to the live-action feature film of the 1990s, which was a real trauma for the company. Finally, it would seem that the Kyoto firm has more self-mockery than we think.