If you want to know where Mario came from, you have to ask Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Donkey Kong, Link, Star Fox, and the most famous of them all, Mario. In 1981, Nintendo asked Miyamoto to design a game to replace the commercial failure Radar Scope on thousands of unsold arcade machines. Miyamoto originally planned to tell a story using characters from Popeye, but Nintendo couldn’t get the rights to those characters, so he replaced them with a gorilla, a lady, and an unnamed carpenter. In later games, the carpenter’s name changed from Mister Video to Jumpman to Mario, after the landlord of a Nintendo warehouse near Seattle. This was one of the first times a game’s story and characters were designed before the programming.