Gaming enthusiasts have known for years that Nintendo named its mustachioed superhero plumber after the company’s owner, Washington state businessman Mario Arnold Segale.
But it has just been determined that Nintendo may have unknowingly named Super Mario’s fictional brother after Segale’s real-life father, Luigi, whose biography evokes that of millions of 20th-century Italian American immigrants.
A senior researcher at genealogy service MyHeritage, Elisabeth Zetland, made that discovery while recently exploring Segale’s ancestral background, using the early April release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie as the occasion. And, as far as she knows, “it’s just a coincidence,” although potentially one of the most important in the history of the video game industry, she told The Guardian in an interview.
Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario confirmed It was definitely in 2015 that he and his colleagues at Nintendo founded the nickname of their legendary character, along with aspects of the businessman’s appearance. reportedly – about Segale, its owner in the 1980s in Tukwila, Washington. A series of video games related to the Italian-American character sold hundreds of millions of copies on various platforms.
However, much less is known about the inspiration for Super Mario’s loyal yet skittish sidekick and brother, Luigi. Miyamoto has said that the original game in the series required two characters who were relatively similar, and Nintendo chose Luigi as a companion because the popular Italian name rhymes with the Japanese word for “similar.”
Others have theorized It may have gotten its name from a pizzeria near Nintendo’s Washington office at the time that was called Mario & Luigi’s.
Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it knew Segale’s father was named Luigi.
Whatever the case, it was amid such uncertainty that Zetland, born in France and of Italian descent, entered the scene to compile Segale’s family history.
He came up with the idea of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s box office dominance. And he said it quickly became clear that a father named Luigi was a figure who loomed large in the life of the real Mario, citing the historical birth, marriage, census, immigration and other records he consulted.
Luigi Maria Segale was born in 1886 in the Italian community of Favale di Malvaro, near Genoa, into a family whose patriarch was a bricklayer. In 1909, Zetland learned, Luigi and his brother, Giuseppe, sailed aboard the steamship Prinzess Irene to Ellis Island, New York, and headed to the Pacific Northwest, settling around Tukwila, Washington, south of Seattle.
Zetland located American military records that showed that Luigi, who adopted the English first name Louis, served in his new country’s armed forces beginning in 1918, during World War I. He was honorably discharged a year later and subsequently made a living as an independent farmer, a journey that echoed those of 4 million Italians struggling with economic hardship and political upheaval who emigrated to the United States over a 35-year period beginning in 1880.
In 1940, Luigi and his wife, Rina, had a six-year-old son named Mario, and census records show that his family had achieved financial stability through their farm, where they grew produce such as tomatoes, lettuce, and onions, and then trucked them to Seattle’s urban markets to sell.
Other documents Zetland found and cited in a 13-page report on his findings provided glimpses into the upbringing of the man who would one day inspire Super Mario.
Mario’s parents celebrated his 12th birthday in 1946 with a meal and cake prepared in the culinary style of the Liguria region that includes Genoa, according to a social column in the local La Gazzetta Italiana. An accordion – or phisharmonic – the performer played as guests spent the afternoon singing together in a house in Seattle that the Segales had just bought at the beginning of the real estate boom in the United States after World War II, a symbol of the prosperity they had managed to achieve after immigrating.
Louis and Rina Segale later earned recognition from the Catholic Northwest Progress newspaper for their support of children enrolled in the Archdiocese of Seattle’s foster care program.
“It’s really a legacy of Italian dreams and American opportunities,” Zetland said.
The couple has since died. Meanwhile, before his own death in 2018, his son Mario embarked on a successful career in construction and real estate in and around Tukwila. Among the various tenants in his building was Nintendo, whose staff was struggling to come up with a name for a stocky, red-capped, high-jumping character who had debuted in the arcade classic Donkey Kong.
The company came to Super Mario one day when Segale walked into its offices and berated one of its officials because the group’s rent was late, as author David Sheff wrote in Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World.
Evidently, Segale was not amused by his connection to Super Mario. In one of his few comments on the matter in 1993, shortly after the publication of Game Over, the notoriously press-shy Segale said the seattle times: “You could say I’m still waiting for my royalty checks.”
His 2018 obituary added that he “always dodged the notoriety” that came with Super Mario’s namesake and “instead wanted to be known for what he accomplished in his life.”
Louis Segale’s thoughts on sharing a name with Super Mario’s brother are lost to time. He passed away in 1981, or five years before the Nintendo Entertainment System title Super Mario Bros. introduced Luigi to the gaming public.
Super Mario and Luigi’s fictional father appeared in a 2023 animated film preceding the April sequel. Voiced by retired Super Mario and Luigi voice actor Charles Martinet, he is not mentioned, but is instead referred to only as “Mario’s dad” in the credits.
