Nintendo has revealed that Mario, while still super, is no longer a plumber.
The news came in an update to Mario’s official character profile on the Japanese Nintendo website. Auto-translated, it reads:
Cheerful and cheerful, everyone’s popular. Twin brother, Luigi is a good friend and a name combination.
With sports utility, I will do everything cool, tennis, baseball, soccer and car racing.
Actually, there seems to have been work on “plumber” a long time ago ….
I love Peach Princess, and if Princess Peach is in trouble, I will go help at any time.
We will face bad koppers with good jumps and various power-ups.
(Autotranslation also reveals of Peach that ”I like cake making and cooking, I am good at sports unexpectedly! What?”)
Several sites have responded to the news by noting that plumbing was only ever a temporary job for Mario. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto said in a 2010 interview that the character’s look was designed to be as distinctive as possible within the low pixel count available in early 80s technology, with the hat being a shortcut to avoid having to animate hair and eyebrows.
Before being named, the ‘Mario’ character in Donkey Kong was considered a carpenter by the game makers and it was only with Mario Bros that he was reassigned as a plumber because the game was largely set underground.